


check the cupboard for your daddy's gun

by lagardère (laurore), MissAntlers



Series: the southern gothic verse [1]
Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, M/M, Small Towns, Southern Gothic, a few more ships in there if you squint, fiery preaching, mentions of the rest of the cast/crew, repressed longing, small churches, snakes bites and moonshine, some violence, southern gothic checklist of dilapidated houses
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-26
Updated: 2020-10-24
Packaged: 2021-03-06 01:41:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 24
Words: 49,050
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25535290
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laurore/pseuds/lagard%C3%A8re, https://archiveofourown.org/users/MissAntlers/pseuds/MissAntlers
Summary: Edward Little returns to his childhood home after over a decade spent up north.Some things are as he left them, the house in the same state it was when his parents passed, as grand and as haunted, but change has begun to creep upon the sleepy Louisiana town: there's a new sheriff and whispers of strange goings-on in the woods; his childhood friend is preaching to a vanishing congregation and someone has been stealing snakes from the nature reserve.Maybe he wouldn't mind it all so much if the boy he used to like wasn't holding out on him, and if every morning wasn't bringing dead birds on his front porch.
Relationships: Lt Edward Little/Sgt Solomon Tozer, Thomas Hartnell/Lt John Irving
Series: the southern gothic verse [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2007115
Comments: 363
Kudos: 129





	1. some kind of exorcism

**Author's Note:**

> This story has been the main creative attempt of our respective lockdowns! Here's to hoping it'll find a few readers, despite how insanely... niche it is? At any rate it has been a fun collaborative experience.

John Irving is the son of a preacher man, who was also the son of a preacher man, who was the son of a thief. Since Prohibition the family has run a little white clapboard church out in the sticks, among trees laden with swaying spanish moss. Maybe it was around that time that they started keeping liquor flasks in hollowed out hymn books. Or maybe that’s just something that John does. 

July has been a hell of grasshoppers and dried up creeks, concrete so hot you can feel it melting the rubber on your soles. Nothing much to do but pray and drink, and when he’s done all he can manage of the former, he puts the little white church in his rearview mirror for the evening, empty bourbon bottle under the driver’s seat rolling back and forth, the sound chasing him all the way out of town.

The bar is a run-down little joint just off the highway, slouched in the dirty grass like the bones of some dead animal, only distinguishable from the other wayside ruins by the fritzing neon sign outside. If he were measuring it out in fingers, like his daddy used to do, John might have said he’d had a hand a half’s worth of rye before the Hartnell brothers found him.

He knows them well enough, the Hartnell boys, like most people know most people around here. Tom and Johnny have a little crawfish trawler they take up and down the bayou, in their overalls, wide-brim straw hats and bare feet. Good, reliable men, by all accounts, but they’re also real superstitious, lining their doorways with coal dust and alligator bones, which John doesn’t hold with. Still, he has little strength to protest when they stumble upon him slumped against the bar. It’s Tom who offers to take him home, always the more mindful of the two, words coming slow and easy as the river. He slings John’s arm over his shoulders, seeming not to care about the smell of spilt alcohol on his dusty black suit.

Tom drives him home in the greasy white Cadillac that John’s father used to say was his pride and joy, and they roll the windows down because the night is hot and the air conditioning hasn’t worked since the eighties. Speeding down the empty roads they hear a whistling coming from the summer-parched fields, and Tom says, “Devil’s out tonight, wouldn’t you say?”

“Devil’s always out in these parts,” John answers, when on another day, a day with no sun and no Tennessee whiskey, he would only have whispered a prayer, quite intently, like he was performing some kind of exorcism. “Devil’s always out, but it’s not every night I can feel him breathing down my neck.”

“Oh,” says Tom knowingly, tapping his fingers on the grubby steering wheel. “You know, my daddy had a problem like that, that’s how me and Johnny ended up running the boat, he couldn’t hardly stand up to steer the damn thing.” Tom glances at him quickly. “S’cuse my language, sir.”

John sighs and rubs his eyes. “I’m not a drunk, Mr Hartnell.”

“Did I say anything about drinking? Thought we was talking about the devil.”

 _Maybe there’s something of the devil in me,_ John thinks later, after he’s snatched a kiss from Tom, or perhaps snatched isn’t the right word. It was too quiet and languorous for that, feverish and whisky-soaked, and it made his blood run slow, made his heartbeat settle like some long-raging part of him had finally agreed to fall asleep. _Maybe there’s something of the devil in me_ , for Tom himself is surely blameless, with his tranquil eyes, his ever-patient smile.

Southern summer nights are made for indefinable desires. John already knows he will be here again, under the cypress trees with his fingers in Tom’s hair, while the air smells of hot tarmac and whiskey, and the river hums along to the devil’s whistling.


	2. bitter black coffee

The diner stands at the junction of East River Street and Main, which is a bold term for a dusty stretch of county road that once led direct to the highway, before developers came and moved the Interstate without so much as a by your leave. The smell that lingers in the air is a strange mix of chemicals from the processing plants along the river, and the bitter black coffee that the factory workers and fishermen flock to consume first thing before their shifts. Strip lights hum from five in the morning to ten at night, reflecting off the colourless linoleum and the formica tabletops, revealing a slight dewiness over every surface: the whole place sweating in the southern heat. A sign outside, scrawled in a marker pen that had clearly been on its way out, claims  _ The best apple pie this side of the Mississippi _ .

When he was a boy, David Bryant used to hurl apples out of the back window of the school bus, trying to see if he could hit mailboxes. Then just last week he had to haul two kids down to the station for doing the same thing, and he remembers thinking,  _ In a town like this, there’s not much to do except walk in circles, and inevitably you end up staring at yourself again. _

He swings by the diner most mornings with a couple of his deputies, usually in time to catch the dregs of the factory workers before they shuffle off to clock in, and the dregs of their gossip too. This morning is no different, and as the sheriff takes a seat in his usual booth by the door, the topic of the moment is the unexpected return of one Edward Little.

“Bobby said he seen him at the gas station. Said he’s got some fancy car now, and he was wearing a suit like he was headed to a funeral or something,” George Chambers is wiping down the counter where Charles Best and John Weekes are sitting in their boilersuits, swilling the last of their coffee in metal cups.

“Ain’t likely,” says Weekes. “Them old Littles are mostly all dead and buried now.”

Best shrugs. “Maybe he’s come back for the house.”

“That creepy place with all the weeds?” says Georgie. “Kinda looks like a messed up face if you stare at it for too long?”

Edward Little hails from a long lineage of gun manufacturers and crooked politicians, who were democrats at a time when democrat meant republican. Bryant can’t say he ever knew the family well – the rest of the Little siblings (and there were many, one of those big old families that didn’t know when to quit) had moved away to the city or the coast before he came into office, and Edward himself left eventually, college or something upcountry. No one comes around the old manor by the river much anymore these days, but there were rumours then just as there are now. Old Si Little - not Edward’s father Simon, who’d been an inconsequential figure at the best of times, but his grandfather – he had the kind of temper that brings a man to heel with a hard-voiced word. The family kept to itself and, as a kid, Bryant had figured the Little children thought they were above the rest of the river folk. Now that he’s seen all manner of troubled kids show up at the station, some of them quiet in the aftermath of their petty crimes, ducking their heads like they can’t conceive of authority as anything else than a backhanded slap, he reckons he might have missed something back then.

“Always something strange about that house.” Weekes shakes his head. “And the family too. Cutting themselves off from everybody like that.”

“Weren’t nothing strange about it, they were just stuck-up sons of bitches. More money than good graces. Got what was coming to them in the end.”

“Charles,” says Georgie, “you’re a menace this early in the morning.”

Best elbows him lightly as he swings round the counter, notepad in hand, and Georgie sticks his tongue out. “Hey, watch it, I got real customers to serve.”

George Chambers is the classier side of trashy, although he does shave his own undercut unevenly with his father’s clippers in secret, and he owns a hot glue gun that he uses to stick rhinestones to every pair of jeans he can get his hands on. Bryant knows this because Georgie has told him, over six month’s worth of slices of apple pie at breakfast. If his family lived somewhere up north they'd be called poor. As it is, living in the rural south, they're somewhat middle class. Their front yard has a chain link fence but not too much junk in it, and Georgie's father takes care to paint the front door every year to stop it from peeling too bad. His folks wanted him to go to college, but Georgie likes to sit on the ledges of billboards, throwing cigarette butts at passing cars, and though he’s prone to saying that someone's going to take him away from here someday, Bryant once heard Mrs Chambers tell her son in front of a dozen diner patrons that he’d better quit batting his eyelashes at the wrong kinds of people, or the only way he’d ever be taken away was in a body bag.

“Good morning, gentlemen,” he says now, cocking his hip against the sheriff’s table. “Ma’am,” he adds, as Deputy Billie Hedges fixes him with her dark-eyed stare.

“Did I hear that right?” she says, a hint of Creole in her bayou twang. “You talking about the Little house just now?”

“I ain’t, it’s all them two.” Georgie rolls his eyes towards Weekes and Best now draining their cups at the counter.

“Yeah well.” Deputy Daly sticks out his prominent chin. “Your friend had it right. Bunch of rich assholes, that’s all they were.”

Hedges scoffs. “Like you even knew them.”

“Those rifles of theirs ain’t half bad though,” says Bryant. “You ever shot one of them?”

“Too many folks round here firing off Hayter rifles,” mutters Daly. “That’s why this parish’s such a damn mess, and you never saw Old Si jumping in to fix it none, even with all that money.”

Georgie taps his pen on the greasy tabletop. “Look, the only thing I’m interested in hearing is your breakfast order. Y’all were twenty minutes late this morning, you know that? Throws my schedule right off.”

Bryant raises his eyebrows. “Consider us warned then. Won’t happen again.”

"You know you talk to that boy like he's your wife sometimes," Daly grins.

Bryant flicks a sugar packet at him across the table as Georgie lays out their napkins. He has rolled up the hem of his apron so that the rhinestone pockets on his jeans are visible, and as he leans across the table, Bryant can see that his bare forearms are patterned with chocolate stains and little burns from the coffee machine.

"Ah come on now, James." The sheriff looks up at Georgie as he says it. "If he were my wife, I'd get a bigger slice of pie."

Talk descends inevitably into work after that. The younger Hartnell siblings being in trouble again for stealing fruit from a roadside stand. A dispute over sugarcane crop that ended in a man’s foot being blown clean off. Various noise complaints from out near the Hodgson place downriver (which prompts a grimly muttered, “Rich folks, man” from Daly). When Georgie eventually emerges from the kitchen, food tray balanced precariously on one hand, Weekes and Best are shrugging into their bulky wax jackets, nodding their goodbyes.

“I hear you got friends in high places, boy,” says Weekes, sparing a glance at Bryant and his deputies.

“You say it like it’s a bad thing.”

“Yeah well,” Weekes grumbles, throwing down a handful of soft crumpled dollar bills. “Suppose it ain't if you wind up in trouble again.”

The trouble, of course, referring to an incident in the spring when Bobby Golding had dared Georgie to play chicken with the freight trains, and he’d stood in the middle of the track with his hands in the air until the driver pulled the emergency brake. The Chambers family had been fined $50 by the Baton Rouge Southern Railroad. When Bryant, driving him to the station that night, had asked what the hell he’d been thinking, Georgie had just said, "Well it ain’t like there's much else to do round here."

Bryant thinks now he might have said the same, back when he was a kid trying to knock over mailboxes. Where will Georgie be ten years from now? Maybe driving that goddamn train. You walk around the same place long enough, eventually you run into yourself again. He wonders, too, what version of Edward Little has been lying here in wait, and why, after all these years, the man would choose to come back and face it now.


	3. the gun house

_How does it look?_

It used to be that to send a text message, Edward had to walk to the road, or down the alley behind the house, all the way to the levee, to get some signal. The house and the grounds around it have always been a curious dead zone. Edward’s brother wrote to him at half past one, but Edward’s phone chimes an hour later, like maybe time goes by slower around here, as sluggish as the wide brown river that he can just about glimpse from the back porch.

 _Like nobody’s been here in years, except maybe a trio of witches, and Norman Bates’ ghost,_ he writes back. Ridley will get the message whenever it goes through. Another hour from now, or maybe in a day or two, whenever Edward finds the energy to drag himself to the coffee shop across from the general store, where they’ve got free Wi-Fi (password: godsaves, John Irving would like that one). The landline must still be in order, but Edward’s not sure he could stand to speak to any of his siblings on the phone.

The paint peels in the heat. The yard is overgrown. Edward sits on the porch swatting mosquitoes and drinking sweet tea, all in black despite the hot damp air.

The advantage of a text message is that nobody will be able to tell that he’s lying by omission, so that when another text does come in, from his sister Charlotte this time - it’s always Charlotte and Ridley, the younger ones, who try to keep in touch, Edward is reasonably sure he hasn’t spoken to any of the older four in at least a year - he doesn’t feel obligated to answer anything beyond, _Everything’s in order._

It’s a far cry from the truth.

He doesn’t know what he expected, coming back after so many years, but it wasn’t to find the house exactly as he’d left it, with its tall brick chimneys and its pointed gable tops, its diamond-shaped shingles and the latticework of the balusters and the brackets and the gable ends, so much woodwork it’s always made his fingers itch for a burning match. Eastlake architecture at its finest. Cheap luxury, giving the illusion of fine craftsmanship although it’s been assembled from a series of mass-produced designs. That’s not how people used to talk about the house, though. To the kids at school, it was sometimes the Witch House, because of the turret and the round opening on the second floor balcony like a large eye, and the turned spindles above the first floor gallery like a row of teeth. Sometimes it was the Gun House, because the brackets at either end of the gallery are sculpted like rifles to remind the passer-by where John Hayter’s money came from. _The business of gunmaking,_ Old Si called it. _The business of war,_ Edward’s father would say, sometimes, in a voice drenched with bourbon, the bitterness unmistakable in his tone.

On the night of his return, Edward had slept in Charlotte and Ridley’s old room. One of the windows in his own room is broken, cardboard nailed over it, with nothing to indicate whether the break occurred several months or several years ago. Most of the Little siblings never come home. Edward can’t speak to their reasons, but the house stopped being a home to him when he tried running away at 17 and his father and older brother brought him back with a pair of rifles. _What if someone had got shot?_ Edward had asked his mother, to which she’d replied, _It’s just the way they are. The guns are less a weapon than a crutch. A walking stick._

 _The kind of stick you beat people with?_ Edward had said, a few minutes before he got called into his grandfather’s office. There were guns on every shelf, guns on racks on the walls, but Old Si hadn’t needed no guns to slap Edward across the face, hard enough that he’d tripped forward and knocked his head into the heavy oaken table on which his grandfather displayed a selection of his hunting trophies.

Old Si never much cared for the town and the town never much cared for him, but in Edward’s absence this dislike seems to have extended to the house as well as its former inhabitants, because when he gets up at the end of a long night, disoriented by the absence of city traffic and by the groans and whispers of the empty house, he finds three dead sparrows on his front porch, lined up across the threshold like a bad omen. 

It’s not like he didn’t know what he was getting himself into, coming back here. He’s never harbored any misbegotten hope that the town would embrace him, and even if he had, the looks he got on his first drive through would have set him straight. It’s not difficult to look at himself through their eyes, to see the young man with his fancy laptop that won’t stand the heat and his business degree in a crisp folder and his accent gone flat with disuse, vowels clipped and sharp. He’d stopped at the station for gas and the homegrown kid at the counter, wheat-coloured hair and wheat-coloured skin, his brown eyes narrowed and his lips pursed in distrust, had handled Edward’s card like he thought it would contaminate him.

His father’s attorney hadn’t minced his words when he’d ushered Edward into his office in Baton Rouge. There’s quite a few people waiting for Edward to sell the land, some of them willing to put the fear of God into him. In the following days, as Edward searches desperately for a different kind of shade than the lugubrious, wake-like shadows of the family house, he takes to bringing one of the Hayter rifles out with him on the back porch, leaning it against the chair like maybe that’ll dissuade anyone from coming too close. 

He’s almost asleep, having dozed off in the afternoon heat, when he hears a rustling in the trees, and on instinct he sits up and fires a warning shot a few yards short, just like his brother taught him.

“Hell, Edward, it’s only me!” John Irving emerges from the undergrowth with a jar of honey in one hand, the other held up in surrender. “Heard you were home, came to see if you needed anything. Didn’t expect I’d have to fight my way in.”

“Sorry.” Edward sits down stiffly. He keeps the gun in his lap, although he’s not quite sure why. “People have been coming around… someone left dead birds on the porch this morning.””

John wipes his brow and nods. “River folk got strange ways, that’s for sure.”

Edward couldn’t say if John is downplaying the situation to try and reassure him, or if he really thinks that this kind of behaviour is common fare around here and nothing much to worry about. The past decade has blunted some of his righteousness and rigor. His smile is fond as they reminisce about their school years, and there’s pride in his voice when he talks about his little church, even though Edward remembers a time when John spoke of leaving as well, and on the morning Edward drove away, there’d been leftover space in his trunk for a missing suitcase; a seat saved in the car for the preacher’s blue-eyed son. Looking back on it in the years that followed, Edward came to wonder whether John might not have spoken of leaving like some people weave daydreams around themselves, the better to stay stuck in one place. 

Eventually John says good day and picks his way back through the wilderness of the Little property. But Edward still sees him long after he’s left, a lean shadow moving through the haze, crossing the dry yellow grass towards the twisted cypresses as the sun burns the city from Edward’s clothes and skin and turns the gun in his lap into a red-hot poker. 

“You should come to church”, John had said, and Edward had nodded.

“I’m glad you’re back”, John had said, and Edward had smiled the sort of smile that his mother used to smile: politeness steeped in despair.


	4. a fancy son of a bitch

Edward hasn’t been to church since his mother’s funeral, five years ago. It took place at the bigger church in the middle of town, the one that has since closed down. There were only a few people in attendance: most of Edward’s siblings, except Eliza who was on her honeymoon in Costa Rica; nobody from the town. Even the preacher had been imported from elsewhere in the parish, though it’s likely that this happened at Simon Little’s behest, rather than because the Irvings refused to officiate.

In the Little household, the Sunday service was mandatory until you turned 14, after which the children were given a choice between going to church or spending their Sunday morning “educating themselves” with a book assigned to them from their father’s library. Edward had chosen the former because he liked the Irvings, John but also his father and his quietly impassioned preaching that crept upon you like vines and then wouldn’t let you go, so that by the time the service ended it wasn’t rare to look around and find that a few people had been moved to tears. Edward and John were allowed to hang out afterwards, which mostly involved them sneaking into the nearby woods to retrieve a cache of cigarettes and a flask of shine from the folds at the base of a bald cypress. Then they’d settle among the roots and Edward would smoke while John scribbled inside one of his little notebooks some mixture of a diary and drafts for future sermons. Later on they’d have a late lunch with John’s father, who pretended he couldn’t smell the whiskey on their breaths.

When he’d moved to the city, Edward had tried walking into a Baptist church once, but he hadn’t stayed long. In the plastered walls and the raspberry-colored carpet and the high, vaulted nave, he’d found nothing of the quaint little wooden church at home, with its rafters painted white and the pale green moss swaying in the wind through the clear windows. He realised then that what he missed wasn’t so much religion as the church building, the pews and the old hymn books and even the musty smell of the aging clapboards.

This Sunday morning John’s church is full of people from Edward’s past. In the front pew sits John Franklin, who used to be sheriff until a scandal involving bribes and an unfinished road somewhere north of the town. Until the service starts, his wife remains standing beside the pew, her keen eyes surveying the gathering. If anyone has a hair out of place, it’ll be the talk of the town before sundown. The current sheriff, burly and fair-haired, Edward knows from school, though it takes him a few minutes to recognize ne’er-do-well David Bryant. He spots a few other former schoolmates; most of them have come with their spouse and children. Former quarterback Graham Gore, whom Edward last saw on the eve of his wedding a week after their finals, now has an unruly posse of five. He spares several minutes to introduce them all to Edward with a benign smile, while his wife makes use of the occasion to inhale a cigarette on the front steps of the church. 

Edward sits in the back once the service begins and lets it wash over him, the long-forgotten fervor of those smalltown gatherings as John’s voice rises loud and strong from the wooden pulpit in front. It’s nothing like his father’s sermons - John doesn’t rely on rhetorical flourishes and he has little belief in persuasion. To him religion is a fact of life and it’s in this way that he’ll present it to his flock: in the simplest terms, his voice ringing in warning, softening to an even-voiced threat.

Afterwards Edward is glad for the air, humid as it may be. In the heat, it shines and ripples like a glossy curtain. When he reaches his car, he finds out that someone has slashed all four of his tires.

“Brutal,” John remarks, as he comes to stand beside him in his short-sleeved shirt, hands in the pockets of his black trousers. John’s father was always clean-shaven and Edward wonders if John has let his beard grow out in rebellion, not so much against his father, but rather against the town folk, the church-goers, to assert to them that he’s his own man, and not his father’s ghost.

For a moment they just stare down at the sunken rubber, neither of them surprised although Edward can’t help but feel defeated, and as the rest of the congregation departs around them, tires spraying dust onto the dry grass, he tries to read some trace of guilt in their faces, even though he knows whomever it was can’t possibly have attended the service.

“I’ll give the shop a call,” John offers, gingerly patting his arm. “They’ll send someone.”

Edward gives a dispirited kick at the front tire.

“Can they send someone who doesn’t hate me?”

“Well, Tozer’s still working there,” John ventures. “If that qualifies.”

Edward’s mouth goes dry and by the time he’s recovered enough to say anything, it’s far too late to feign confusion. John clears his throat. 

“He didn’t hate you.”

“I suppose he didn’t,” Edward says.

Sol Tozer was something of a celebrity in their high school, even though he’d dropped out when Edward and John were still in 10th grade. Bluejeans so worn out you could see every line of his body, cowboy boots that rumour had it he’d won doing rodeo across the border in Texas instead of sitting his final exams. Never came to church and never had no need for it, made his own religion shooting beer bottles off of fence posts and taking boys up in the woods. He used to drive the dirtiest pick-up this side of the bayou, would roll up to school with the bass guitar of some Black Rebel Motorcycle Club song thrumming across the parking lot, lean out of the window and holler, “Hey Little, you need a ride home?”

And Edward always went when he called, wherever Sol wanted him to go. At school no one understood why. Was it a bullying thing and if so who was bullying who? Was it a drug thing? Did they drink together, shoot empty bottles together, with Sol providing the targets and Edward the guns, didn’t Sol live at the Great Oaks Mobile Home Park and hadn’t people there seen Edward slink in between the trailers once or twice, a pack of beer and a few magazines under his arm like an offering, whatever he thought Sol might like, car magazines or porn, whatever he’d found at the petrol station a mile out before the trailer park, where the girl at the counter cashed in the beer and the porn with a knowing smile and Edward nervously handed over his shiny credit card - until he understood what it was that Sol was after, or part of it at least? Then he started bringing guns instead, the rare ones, the ones his grandfather cleaned every week until they shone before he replaced them on their shelf and closed the fancy metal shutter, locked it shut, except Edward had long since understood the mechanism of the drawer where Old Si hid the keys.

“What’s he like now?” he asks John.

“He’s a good mechanic. Sometimes he’ll break a guy’s nose to remind people it ain’t worth messing with him. Should I call him then?”

“Yeah, alright,” Edward says, and he wanders off before he can change his mind, to wait in the shade of a large oak tree.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


When Edward had first approached him, Sol was already working part-time at the shop. People at school said that he could get you any machine parts you wanted, provided you had something to trade. That day Edward went to the mobile home park with a rolled up magazine he’d stolen from his brother James’ room. Jamie had had quite a few stashed away under his mattress, Edward had seen them once when Wendy the maid was changing the sheets. He had no idea which one Sol might like, seeing as the lurid pictures of women in various stages of undress had no effect on him whatsoever, and so he’d taken the one that looked the most recent, the least faded. If anyone asked him what he’d gone there to do, he’d tell them he needed new spokes for his bicycle. It was a lie, of course. His grandfather would have paid for those if he’d asked - his father, with his rather lax grasp on the idea of consumerism, would have bought him a new bicycle and fostered the broken one on Wendy’s son. But no one at school needed to know that. Edward would tell them his parents were trying to teach him the meaning of life, or something of the sort.

Yet when Sol had asked him what he wanted - sitting on the steps of the trailer, fiddling with what might actually have been a spoke - Edward’s carefully rehearsed speech had flown out the window, leaving him staring down obstinately at the expensive pair of sneakers he’d demanded for his birthday, now muddied by the track leading from the road to the rows of trailers.

“I said, what do you want,” Sol repeated.

Edward looked up, but only as far as Sol’s hands.

“To hang?”

Sol didn’t ask him why, just shrugged and said, “You want a beer?” 

Edward watched him retrieve two cans of Lone Star from a wet cloth bag dripping in the sink. “Cooler’s busted,” Sol had said by way of explanation, as he handed one off to Edward, and Edward somehow remembered himself in time to refrain from asking why Sol hadn’t just bought a new one. They stood in the cramped little kitchen and watched each other drink, until Sol went back to sit on the trailer steps. After a moment, Edward joined him.

They talked about hunting and guns and about their families, their fathers mostly. Sol said his father had been a pretty well-known bull-rider back in the day, but he kept his secrets to himself, never gave young Solomon a word of advice, never came to see him ride. Edward didn’t know much about rodeo, but he imagined what his older brother might say: that the only riding that’s got any point to it lasts longer than eight seconds. He said this out loud before he could stop himself, and Sol snorted. “Money’s a good point, ain’t it?” he said, and Edward had to agree with that.

They spent the afternoon drinking cheap beer until the sky was the colour of peaches, and Edward said he'd have to be getting back soon. He expected Sol to make a jab at him for that. Little rich boy gotta run home to his mamma. But Sol just gave him that quick nod again and said, "Alright. See you round maybe."

"Yeah, maybe. Maybe I can come around next week sometime."

Sol shrugged. "Or tomorrow."

Edward had cycled home through the drunken light, thinking he'd never had such a good time, feeling he could have pawed the white right out of the moon.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


It’s not Sol but another guy from the shop who comes to pick up the car. Pretty Boy Pilkington they used to call him, with this absurdity of nicknames that end up being longer than the actual name. Edward also knows Pilkington from school, though he’s younger than Edward by a few years and Edward isn’t sure they ever did exchange a word back then. He doesn’t have any particular desire to talk to him now and the feeling must be mutual, because Pilkington doesn’t say a word all the way to the shop.

He leaves Edward by the desk, mumbling something about paperwork, and Edward is still there some fifteen minutes later, wondering if he should steal new tires and run, when Sol walks in in his overalls, dark smears in his light brown hair, rubbing his hands on a dirty piece of cloth that looks about liable to make his grease-black hands grimier than they already are.

“You the guy with the dead tires?” he asks, pulling a crumpled cigarette out of his front pocket. “Some angry fuck did a number on your car.”

“I’m used to it,” Edward replies, and something in his tone must have tipped Sol off, because he goes still as a statue, his fingers curled around his cigarette. Slowly he raises his head.

"It’s nice to see you,” Edward says, fighting not to wince at the absurdity of the greeting.

"Little," Sol says, and Edward thinks _Oh, that's how it's going to be, is it?_

"Should have guessed it was you, ain't no one else around here driving a car like that." He leans back against the counter and sparks up his cigarette, despite the faded 'no smoking' sign behind him, a relic from the days his uncle Solomon used to own the place. (And hadn't that been a joke, back in the day. _"Your real name is Solomon Tozer III? And you joke about me being a fancy son of a bitch." "You are a fancy son of a bitch."_ )

Edward can't tell if Sol's angry with him. He remembers him being the sort of guy who'd throw a punch first and talk it out later, at least that's how it was at school, but now it feels as though he's being chipped away at. 

"The car," he says, when the sight of Sol watching him through a faint haze of Marlboro smoke is starting to make him feel as though he's shivering, even though it’s hardly any cooler in here than it was outside. "The car – is it a lost cause, do you think?"

Sol snorts. "How hard d'you think it is to change a tire, Little? Nah, but the rims are messed up pretty bad from having to take all the weight while you were sitting in church for three hours. That's gonna take some work. The real question is" – he leans forward, elbows on the counter, sticking out his jaw in that way he used to when he wanted to pick a fight – "are you gonna stick around long enough to see it fixed?"

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


Once Edward’s looked over a quote that he’s quite sure Sol made illegible on purpose, Sol has Pretty Boy Pilkington drive him home. The conversation is hardly any livelier than on the way to the shop - Edward getting as far as, “The house is after the…”, only for Pilkington to interrupt him, “Yeah I know it,” before he returns to chewing a stick of gum, his eyes steady on the road. When he drops Edward off, he leans out the window of his truck to ask, “So, is it real?”

“Is what real?”

“Is your house haunted?” Pilkington gazes up at the shingles and the pointed roofs. “I hear it’s the ghosts of them people who died because of your Hayter guns.”

The front gate gives a resounding creak when Edward pushes it open.

“I’m the only ghost around here,” he says.

Inside the house is cool but it has an old smell, of things left to wither in the dark and damp. When Edward tries to get into his grandfather’s office, the key cramps inside the lock, and it takes a few tries before he can force his way inside. The door comes to rest against the dusty edge of an old rug, ornate green leaves on a purple background, a pattern similar to the acanthus leaves of the wallpaper. Nothing appears to have moved since Old Si died - it’s the same guns in their shuttered cases, the same stuffed birds on the table in the middle of the room and that large alligator skull that Jamie used to call Louie. The first time Edward went into this room, he was ten years old and his brother had promised him a ten dollar bill if he managed to kiss Louie’s snout. Once Edward had successfully broken into the office during his grandfather’s daily nap, and crept towards the table, terrified to be caught, by either his grandfather or any of the dead animals in the room, once he’d kissed the cold bone snout and run back outside to tell James, who was reading a comic book on a lawn chair in the alley, James had looked at him over the top of his sunglasses and said, “What, and I’m supposed to take your word for it?”

The second time Edward snuck into the room behind his grandfather’s back, he was sixteen and he wanted to retrieve a LeMat revolver that he’d promised Sol he could get his hands on. It was only the first of a long series of guns he’d borrow over the following two years, and now he finds them again, one after another, on shelves heavily coated with dust. Strange that in such a large house, the most important memories of his teenage years should be concentrated in this one room where he wasn’t allowed to go, where he wouldn’t have been caught dead while his grandfather was inside, his black eyes staring down into the barrel of a gun, the familiar case open beside him with its lubricants and bore brushes and worn bits of cloth. 

On the wall opposite his grandfather’s desk, there’s a black and white picture of Edward’s Hayter great-grandparents, stiff and solemn in their dark clothes. 

“What a disappointment I must be to you,” Edward murmurs, brushing a finger against the dusty glass of the picture frame.

Whatever he told Pilkington, it’s hard to believe there’s no other presence in the house, when the figures in the picture are staring straight at him with their sad dark eyes, when the chair behind the desk still bears the imprint of his grandfather’s back in its leather upholstery, when the prolonged groan of a floorboard somewhere above could almost make him believe that there’s someone upstairs - in his parents’ room, or perhaps in the turret, where rumor has it that his great-great-aunt Isabella shot herself with the gun that had made her brother’s fortune.

Edward wipes his hands on his jeans, leaving pale imprints on the black denim. It’s not the picture of his ancestors that has drawn him to this side of the room, but the rack above it, which bears a familiar lever-action rifle with a sleek, walnut grip. Here is the one gun Edward ever asked to borrow, the only one Old Si ever knowingly lent him, ahead of a hunting trip Edward and Sol took when Edward was in 11th grade. They stayed in some old fishing shack out in the swamp, bagged a deer and poked each other with the antlers while they sat round the fire, the rivets in their jeans getting hot, until Sol said, _“You do that one more time, Little, I’m gonna come over there and pin you down.”_

 _“Do it, then,”_ Edward had said, wanting to sound fearless, though his voice came out pleading instead. If Sol hadn’t come forward he’d have kept staring at the ground, digging trenches in the mud with a splintered stick - but Sol did come forward and snatched the stick from his fingers to throw it into the fire before he pushed Edward down onto the ground, knees planted on either sides of his legs, _“Oh, you want this, do you?”_

Edward had never been much good at lying.

During his first two years of college he’d stayed in a tiny dorm room at UVA and he’d put the antler up on a shelf. _“Little’s redneck roots,”_ the others used to say, the sons and daughters of his parents’ friends. He didn’t know what had happened to the other antler but he figured it had stayed where they’d left it, to be slowly overtaken by the mud and moss, eaten by whatever makes a meal of antlers, insects and worms and the devil on his nightly strolls. 

Until Pilkington had dropped him off at the shop and he’d seen it on the shelf behind the front desk, recognising it from the scars along the side where Sol had amused himself with his knife, carving something that looked very much like Edward’s initials if you looked at it sideways.


	5. a real southern belle

There's an old farm off the county road – sugar cane and cattle and not much of anyone's business. It's belonged to the Crozier family since some great-grandfather or other jumped ship from Ireland and headed out west, and there is a mildewed sepia photograph of Francis Crozier's own grandfather hanging up in the kitchen that has been there so long Francis no longer sees it.

The farm is little more than a two field ranch now, one for cane and the other home to the ornery old cow that once threw Francis off her back when he was young and hot blooded enough to try and ride her. It was different a few years back, Sophia thinks, fanning herself with her hand as she steps out of the dark house into the midday heat. Back then there were always plenty of boys who would come up on the weekends and help with the harvest, boys who needed the work, and Sophia had formed closer friendships with those sun-skinned farmhands than with any of the girls at school. But then bad flooding meant most of the farms went under, and all those boys went away to school or found themselves a steadier job someplace else, leaving Francis shooting whiskey on the porch in the middle of the day, with only blue-eyed Thomas Jopson, who whistles while he works.

“It’s not good for him, staying holed up like this,” Sophia says as she heads for her car. “You could talk to him, try and persuade him to get out properly. He’d listen to you.”

Perhaps she imagines it but she thinks Jopson looks at her sympathetically then, like he can hear in her enunciation the effort she puts into her accent now. Jopson, she knows, has trained himself out of his southern drawl by watching old Hollywood movies, breaking apart his speech patterns and rebuilding them until he had this Trans-Atlantic staccato that always makes her think of _Casablanca_.

“You know what Crozier’s like,” Jopson says. “Stubborn as hell once he sets his mind to something, and he’s set his mind to staying here.”

She appreciates that he didn’t lie to her, didn’t say something like _This is what Crozier wants_. They both know that isn’t true.

There had been talk, back in the day, of Francis taking on some of the old Franklin property nearby. It’s prime land, closer to the river making it richer for growing cotton and soy. Sophia had always been fond of Francis growing up. She liked his tall tales and his dark sense of humour and that gap between his front teeth. It opened up this great well of fondness in her, and after graduation, when she was drifting aimlessly through the summer, they somehow became engaged. In those days, folks saw her as a real southern belle, right out of some old movie with her hair in golden ringlets. She even called her aunt and uncle _ma’am_ and _sir_ , and it had been their not-so-secret hope that she would find a nice young man to settle down with. But Francis Crozier was neither young nor particularly nice, and her uncle, John Franklin, wouldn’t have it and sent her away up country. By the time she returned, with a haircut and a job teaching literature at the university in Baton Rouge, she wasn’t so interested in a husband anymore, and she’d never had much love for being a farmer’s wife besides. So when the time came and her Aunty Jane wanted to move into town, her uncle sold his farm to a Mr Fitzjames, who came down from New York in a shiny car, wearing a suit that had been specially cut for him. Francis hated him on sight.

This last detail Sophia knows because it has been the topic of conversation for the last three quarters of an hour. Sitting out back on the porch on the creaking swing seat, she'd listened to Francis picking apart his new neighbour while Jopson offered them sweet tea and Francis waved him away, taking regular swigs from a hip flask with a bullet dent in the middle. Across the field they could see Fitzjames walking around in his shirtsleeves, shovel in hand.

“What’s he think he’s doing now, eh?” Francis raised a pair of binoculars to his eyes. “Too late for planting, he’s gonna make a mess of that Italian tailoring, that’s for sure.”

Jopson tucked his sweat-damp hair behind his ear and said neatly, “Maybe he got up early to spy on you too, sir.”

“I don’t think he knows what he’s doing either,” Sophia said, not unkindly.

James Fitzjames had called at her uncle’s townhouse for dinner a couple nights ago, and once they were done eating he insisted on clearing the dishes from the table all by himself. Sophia has worked with enough young people these last few years to recognise when somebody just wants to be liked. He talked a lot too, wouldn’t let a silence stretch too long without filling it with some anecdote––what he called his ‘adventures’ in Brazil––where he seemed to have spent quite some time. Sophia even wondered if he might be Brazillean himself, something in his complexion, but his accent gave nothing away. Like Jopson, like her, he seemed to have taught himself to disguise where he came from.

Uncle John had told Fitzjames that, when it came to the farm, he’d do well to follow Francis’ example. The sort of man who “knew what was what” he’d said. “Could grow sugarcane through concrete.”

Loose stones from the dirt track ping against her wheels as Sophia’s car bumps down to the county road. She wonders if Fitzjames has figured out yet that, these days, Francis isn’t doing much more than swigging whiskey and staring at him across the field.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


“So you saw him then?”

“Oh, I saw him alright.” Sophia collapses into the seat opposite Silna, peeling her blouse off the small of her back where sweat has pasted it to her skin. “But whether he saw me? Your guess is as good as mine.”

“What do you mean?”

The diner hums around them, the white noise of strip lighting and AC making the whole place seem sleepy before the arrival of the lunchtime rush. Through the kitchen hatch, Sophia can see young George Chambers trying to curl his hair with the hot end of a ladle.

“Have you ordered anything yet?”

“You’re changing the topic. I thought you called because you wanted to talk about your man.”

Sophia had met Silna in a nightclub bathroom in Baton Rouge, barely a week ago, when the two of them were full of tequila. Silna lent her a hairband and Sophia had clutched it to her chest as she sat down on the sweating floor tiles, claiming it was the first thing anyone had ever given to her without expecting something in return. Silna has heavy brown boots and dark hair plaited in two braids as thick as whip handles. She grew up fishing in the cold seas along the coast of Nunavut with her father, although she reveals about as much of her life in Iqaluit as she does anything else, which is to say very little. She carries a big canvas backpack with a military look to it, decorated with pins and iron-on patches from just about every national park in the country. Sophia would reckon that what Silna doesn’t know about the world could be written on a scrap of cigarette paper with room still left over for Bible verses.

Sophia presses the heels of her hands against her eyes and sighs. “Francis Crozier is not my man.”

“Do you want him to be?”

“No.” She straightens up. “No. Definitely not. God, but you should see him, he just sits on that porch all day marinating in bourbon, and I can’t help feeling like...”

The door goes and a young couple walks in, faces fresh as milk but their church clothes wilting in the heat. Sophia doesn’t recognise them, and she sags a little in her seat with relief. Better the town doesn’t get to gossiping about all that again.

The gossip had played as much a part in her departure as her uncle’s disapproval. She didn’t like the feeling of people’s eyes on her – people who didn’t know her, who only thought of her as _that girl who got mixed up with old Crozier_. She didn’t like the way they talked about Francis either. So for four years she lived in a grubby tenement building up north with a veritable jungle of houseplants, drank nothing but black beer and coffee, while the iron in the water turned all her white church blouses sepia. She learned the difference between the sound of fireworks and gunshots, and read the kind of books that had been banned at her high school, while the single tube of lipstick in her bathroom cabinet slowly desiccated to chalk. Her favourite authors were the Victorians. The way they wrote reminded her of the people she had known growing up – straightlaced and repressed, burying their feelings and intentions under heaps of words, yet hoping someone would care enough about them to peel back the layers and see the soul beneath. Always, always, she thought, we just want to be seen. Seen, not simply looked at, the way this place had once looked at her.

She’d been surprised to learn that Silna had voluntarily moved to the little town that she had wanted to leave for the first eighteen years of her life. _“You could have studied reptiles anywhere,”_ she’d said, when they were lying on the hood of Silna’s jeep, passing a warm bottle of Old Number Seven back and forth. _“You could have been in Miami or something. It’s not like they don’t have snakes and gators in Florida.”_ And Silna had smiled in that close-lipped way of hers, like she knew something about you that you were yet to figure out. _“There’s something about this place though, no?”_

Silna leans forward on the formica table, her flannel shirtsleeves riding up.

“I’m going to say something, and you’re probably not going to like it… You should stop visiting him.”

“It’s not that simple.”

“You like that he used to like you, so you keep going back there, and you’ve been lonely enough that the memory of being liked is enough. But you have to stop picking at this scab or it’s only going to heal ugly.”

Sophia frowns and busies herself with the menu, because that is not untrue.

“What can I get for you ladies?” George Chambers deposits a heap of assorted cutlery on the table and then stands there eagerly tapping his pen against his notepad. Sophia notes, with no small amount of horror, that he appears to have taped a piece of his hair back on, no doubt as a result of the hot ladle.

“What’s the catfish like?” Silna asks.

“Tastes like mud. Hey, ain’t you that snake lady? Bobby says you got some place out in the swamp, you collect snakes and stuff?”

Silna raises her eyebrows. “Well I don’t know anyone called Bobby, but sure. Snake lady. Not the worst thing I’ve been called.”

“I don’t like snakes, always figure they’re gonna get in through my window at night. Tom Hartnell gave me a piece of twisted rope, said snakes can’t cross it, is that true?” Chambers stops for a moment to take a breath, but before Silna can respond he slaps his notepad against his thigh and says, “Hey, Miss Cracroft, did you know Edward Little’s back in town? I ain’t seen him myself, but I swear it’s all anyone’s been talking about these last few days.”

Sophia blinks at him. “Edward’s back?”

“Yeah. Weren’t you and him friends back in the day?”

Silna smiles, “So there’s a second guy?” and Sophia has to laugh at that.

“No, Edward is... It wasn’t like that with Edward.”

“He lives in a haunted house,” Chambers says, with great confidence.

Lord, that house. The Franklins were a decent family – what with Uncle John serving as sheriff and their family name on tombstones dating back to the Civil War – and so the Littles had tolerated Sophia’s presence in Edward’s life. Most afternoons, if she wasn’t at the ranch with Francis, she would wind her way up to Edward’s bedroom at the top of the house. He was quieter than his siblings, less arrogant than his older brothers and sisters, less ebullient than the younger two. They'd lie on his bed listening to old records on some ancient gramophone, smoking cigarettes with the window open so that his parents wouldn’t notice the smell. She never set much store in the ghost stories that lingered around the Hayters and Littles; the folks that their guns had killed were six feet under, and not likely to come bothering them anytime soon. But Edward grew up with a haunted look about him all the same.

Sophia figured it was a good sign when she hardly heard from him in college. She could understand that he might want to leave her behind along with everything else: the house and the town and the red welts his grandfather left on the back of his knuckles. Sometimes she tried to imagine him as a student, wearing a suede jacket and smoking clove cigarettes at an expensive bar somewhere with his expensive friends. It would have been easier to let him go if she thought he was happy. They shared a few truncated text exchanges every now and again, but he never said anything of substance. This class was a little basic, or that party wasn’t worth going to in the end. That sort of thing. But it always felt like there was something behind his messages, some great wave pushing up against fractures in a glass wall.

It was Edward who had most often come to mind when she was reading her Victorian novels, and Sophia had thought to herself at the time that her friendship had been enough for him. That he had felt seen by her. But days, George Chambers had said, Edward had been back for _days_ , and he didn’t think to let her know. _Ghost of a boy_ , she thinks now, and the feeling settles as an ache under her breastbone. Perhaps she had just been looking through him all along.


	6. ain't we all sinners?

That afternoon finds John sitting out in the little rowing boat moored in the water behind the church, underlining passages in his father’s bible. He uses a funeral flyer as a straight edge, the tip of his tongue poking out between his teeth as he concentrates.

Tom Hartnell is sitting at the other end of the boat, which might once have been white, but the paint is peeling and the swamp has gotten to it enough that it’s just a mossy kind of green all over. He’s mending a shrimp net with a bone needle, the way his mamma taught him, and his toes are resting against the tip of John’s shoe, but that’s as close as they’ll get for now. There are still folks who roll up to the church on Sunday with Confederate flag stickers on their bumpers. John will be  _ Pastor _ or  _ sir _ until the sun goes down.

“Hey Pastor, you hear Edward Little came home?”

“I did,” John says, not looking up from his sermon. “I took him some honey.”

“You and your bees. Is it true you gotta tell them when somebody dies?”

“So they say. Or you’ll find your hives empty, and all the honey in your house will turn to vinegar.”

“Why, Pastor, I do believe you’re a little superstitious.”

John raises his eyebrows, smiles and shakes his head. That last part he made up, but he figured Tom would like it.

“How’s he doing, your Mr. Little?”

“He’s not my Mr. Little. And I don’t know, tell you the truth.” John considers this a moment and then adds, “I don’t think he’s getting much sleep. Someone slashed his tires after worship yesterday, and he says folks have been leaving dead things on his doorstep. You got any idea what that might be about?”

Tom kicks his foot lightly. “You think me and mine got something to do with it?”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Someone’s tryin’a hex him or something, that the kind of thing you want me to say?” Tom grins. “Sounds to me like someone’s just fucking with him. Can’t say I’m surprised neither. Old Si weren’t too fond of the river folk, pointed one of them old fashioned pistols at my daddy once just for fishing his stretch of water. I doubt the man being dead’s gonna stop folks being mad.”

John nods, although he’s not entirely convinced. Yesterday Edward wore a bone-deep exhaustion in his sloping shoulders, in the hollows around his eyes, and it had seemed like more than the result of a few harmless pranks. John’s known Edward a long time, he’s seen him brush off a lot of things that would keep most people up at night, but this– the angry rips in his tires, the dead animals left in the night – seems to be really getting to him more than Old Si ever did. Still, he thinks, the space in this little boat is not so much; he doesn’t want to fill it all with Edward.

“You never did tell me what happened to your daddy,” he says instead.

Tom sets his needle down and swats at a swamp fly. “It ain’t no kind of story.”

“You ever wonder where he is now?”

“My daddy? Singing with the heavenly host, probably, I dunno. You walk out on a woman and five kids, maybe they don’t take you at the pearly gates. But you’d know more about that than me, Pastor.”

Tom leans back in the prow and closes his eyes for a moment. The afternoon light filtering through the cypress leaves overhead leaves bright patches across his bare shoulders, turning clusters of freckles into burning constellations.

“I meant what I told you though.” He stifles a yawn with the back of his hand. “My daddy had the devil in him. More ways than one.”

“Don’t all fathers?” John had not disliked his father, although even now he feels that he didn’t really know the man. Never raised his voice or his hand, but spoke with more conviction to his congregation than he ever did his wife and son. No, John is thinking more of Edward’s father, and that poor bastard’s old man too.

“Don’t each of us?” Tom says. “Ain’t that what you’re always saying on Sundays? Ain’t we all sinners?”

John slides his leg along so that their feet are aligned, his spit-shined wingtip and Tom’s bare foot, warm against each other.

“Not you,” he says.


	7. yellow grass

“There used to be a sugar plantation here. The house stood exactly in the same place - I think it was bigger than our house. It looks bigger on the old photographs we’ve got. It was crumbling down by the time my great-grandfather bought the land, and most of the sugarcane fields around here had turned to sharecropping, and a few decades after that they were bought off by big companies... When the previous house was built, the main road was the river road, so the house faced towards the water.” Edward indicates the alley of oak trees that goes all the way to the levee. “That alley used to be the main access to the house, from the river.”

Farther along the alley stands a rickety old target planted in the dust. From this distance, Sophia can’t tell if Edward’s hit the bullseye or not. There’s a rifle leaned against the wall of the house - he moved it when she arrived, from the side of his chair to behind the two of them, presumably so it wouldn’t look so damn threatening.

“Is this what you’ve been doing since you got here? Shooting targets in your backyard?”

“I’ve never been much good at it,” Edward admits. “Jane’s the best shot out of the seven of us. She used to drop birds in flight…” He motions with his hands, two fluttering wings. “... before any of us had spied so much as a fleck of shadow in the sky.”

“You might have told me you were coming home.” Sophia closes her eyes, tilting her head back against the wicker chair. “Or did you just figure rumors travel faster than texts these days?”

“Didn’t you say you were never coming back?” There’s nothing bitter or taunting in Edward’s voice, only a mild sort of curiosity. “I thought I had a memory of you... screaming it from the top of the bleachers, graduation day. Although I suspect we’d all had a lot to drink, that night.”

“From what I remember, you were right there with me, and you said the same thing. And yet here we are.”

“No hope for us, is there?” Edward notes drily.

Sophia thinks of Francis Crozier drinking in the sun as the weeds slowly colonise his fields, against Jopson’s best efforts, and she wonders if they’re any different than Francis, Edward and her. Sitting on that rotting porch with the weeds climbing as high as the banister in places. Yellow grass pushes through the gravel of the alley and further away the river glints in the sun; every other year the levee crumbles and they have to move it back, cutting down a pair of centuries-old trees. One day the water will be lapping against their feet, and the house will gently sink into it. 

Looking at Edward’s serious profile, she’s reminded of a burning house she saw one night, when she was heading back to Louisiana through the plains country. There was nothing but blackness all around her, save for her headlights cutting a little wedge into it, she could have been in the middle of the ocean for all she knew – and then suddenly in that big dark, a crown of flame the size of her thumbnail trembled into view. She drove for an hour watching it on the horizon, until eventually she had to pull off the road to close her eyes. And when at last she looked up at the clear sky, it was punched with bullet holes of light whenever she blinked. That’s how Edward seems to her – a house on fire in the night that she could only watch from a distance. No way of knowing how it started, just some little flame of the heart that usually dies out on its own, but in some folks soars into uncontrollable conflagration.

Maybe her mistake has been to think that she was any different - from Edward, from Francis. Maybe the three of them will become part of the blackened and burnt and buried and drowned history of a place that they never really wanted to inherit. But those aren’t thoughts for a hot afternoon, when the sky is pure blue and the weeds rustle to some ghost tune.

“You’re being grim,” she decides, unsure whether she’s talking to Edward or to herself. Sitting up briskly, she wipes her brow with the back of her hand. “Get up. We’ll head off to the bayou. Visit Silna.”

“Silna?”

“My friend at the animal sanctuary. You can pet a baby gator. You’ll feel better about...” She waves her hand. “Your missing car. Your missing siblings. The kids trying to scare you off.”

“I doubt it,” Edward says, but he gets up when she does, and follows her to her car. At the last moment he turns, fishing his keys out of his pocket, and picks his way back through the dead grass to lock up the house. 

Even as he does it, Sophia can’t quite convince herself that it’ll be of any use. This is the sort of land where all kinds of bad things come barging in, regardless of whether or not you’ve sent them an invitation. Most of the time they don’t bother knocking before they tear down your door.


	8. little acts of desecration

The evening is so warm you could boil an egg in the river. Edward is righting the target when Sol shows up, and momentarily he’s relieved to have taken the rifle with him, slinging it over his shoulder instead of leaving it on the porch, as if Sol might have picked it up and taken a shot. At the target, at Edward himself where he stands beside it, or at the very sky, firing off what Jamie used to call a “warning shot” and what Edward’s mother, whose patience with the men in their family was limited, would have called “a waste of bullets”. 

Sol waits in one of the wicker chairs for Edward to return, his long legs crossed at the ankles, smiling his wayward smile.

 _The only thing those Tozers will ever be any good at is pumping tires,_ Edward’s sister Eliza had informed him, once the rumors of Edward and Sol’s acquaintance had reached her, sometime at the beginning of Edward’s senior year. _Is this really the kind of person you want to associate with?_

Eliza was in DC at the time, interning for a senator whose wife used to go to school with Sarah Little. It was the first time Edward had heard from her since she’d come home for Christmas ten months before. He’d let her give her little speech, fully aware that he could hardly voice his disagreement. What would he have said? _I know he’s a good shot, because I steal guns from Old Si for him to shoot. I know he’s good at living on his own, because he can cook and clean and if Wendy gets a week off, all seven of us become dependent on canned beans and peach preserves. I know he’s good at reading people, because he got a better read of me on the day we met than any of you did in sixteen years. I know he’s good in bed, because when we’re not taking shots at empty beer cans or at the local wildlife, I let him fuck me hard into that ancient mattress at the back of his trailer._ This would have incensed Eliza more than the idea of Edward having sex with men, the shabby setting of the act, from the broken springs digging into Edward's back to the heart-shaped ashtray full of cigarette butts teetering precariously on the shelf over the bed, threatening to upend on them if Sol didn't let up the pace.

Any of these repartees would have propelled them into a conversation Edward very much did not care to have. So he’d kept his mouth shut, and the next time Sol and him had met up to shoot bottles off a ledge, Edward had tried to picture his own face instead of the target, wan and sullen-faced and resigned like he saw himself in the mirror every morning, and he’d wondered if he’d ever have the courage to fight for himself.

When he reaches the stairs below the porch, Sol sits up, only just, and tosses him his car keys.

“Brought back your car.”

“Can I get you a drink?”

Sol grins. “I see the East Coast ain’t gone and erased all your manners, Little.”

“I wasn’t… Never mind,” Edward sighs, rubbing at his forehead. “I’m getting a beer. Do you want one?”

“Sure.”

This time he does leave the rifle within Sol’s reach, leaning it against the window before he opens the screen door. Inside the house, he doesn’t give himself time to collect his thoughts, marching to the kitchen to retrieve and open two of the beers he’d bought at the general store the day before, stopping by the living room on the way back to write a check to the shop, his handwriting curling in the exact same way it did when he’d just learned to write. The beers have left rings of condensation on his great-grandmother’s mahogany table. As a kid, Edward would have driven himself half-mad over it. Now he’s quite conscious that he might be doing those things on purpose, might have always done them on purpose, little acts of desecration that coalesce into some larger rebellion against his upbringing and everything it stands for.

When he comes back outside, Sol has moved from the porch to the overgrown courtyard. The smoke of his cigarette curls upwards towards the broad crown of the nearest oak tree.

“Don’t set fire to the garden,” Edward says, handing him a beer. “Can’t say I’m in love with the place, but it doesn’t mean I want to see it go up in flames.”

“D’you know that’s what happened to that big old manor downriver? The one that was, what, ten miles from here?”

“ _La Mélodie_?”

“No, the one before that. What used to be the Fairholmes’ place. There was always people there after dark, passing through. Must have forgotten to put out a fire one night. You'll see it if you drive by, the roof’s fallen in. Only a matter of time before they pull it down. It’s probably a good thing you came back.”

“Is it?” Edward looks up at the house, at the weeds growing through the roof and the paint peeling over the shingles, every window like the entrance to a cold cave, the kind that echoes around you as bones crunch underfoot.

“You’re doing it again,” Sol says, the way he used to, with the exact same tone, untroubled and amused. “You’re getting lost in your own head.” And as if it had been twelve minutes and not twelve years, he wins back Edward’s attention with a hand at the back of Edward’s neck, heavy and warm. Edward tilts his head back and closes his eyes, wondering that after all this time he shouldn’t have found other hands to steady him. There’s been other men, tough guys and guys who ran at the first sign of danger, men who acted solely on impulse and men who thought too fast for him to follow, men to whom he’d never given his full name and a couple he’d introduced to his urbane friends, one of whom he’d taken along to a rare brunch with Charlotte and Ridley. And still, throughout it all, it had never been quite that same rush, tempered by Sol’s strong grip and his patient drawl.

It’s so easy to wrap a hand around Sol’s arm, feeling the coiled muscle there, to lean in and kiss him, slow and searching at first and then with more pressure when Sol doesn’t pull away. In some ways, it’s little more than the culmination of a train of thought that Edward’s been pursuing since he walked into the shop - or perhaps since John mentioned Sol outside the church, or maybe even earlier than that, since that day in Chicago when Jane called and asked if Edward would come down and deal with the house. Jane often stepped in when the family needed immediate results, or a firm and brusque handling of an embarrassing situation. _You didn’t come to Daddy’s funeral, so this one’s on you, Eddie._ And Edward had hung up and wondered if Sol Tozer was still living in that trailer, hoping for Sol’s sake that wasn’t the case, hoping for his own sake that he’d find him exactly where he’d left him, in a somewhat cavalier fashion, all those years ago. 

When Sol takes the beer bottle from Edward’s hand and sets it down on the ground beside his own, like some pagan offering at the foot of the oak tree, and returns to kissing him, sun-drenched skin hot under Edward’s hands, it’s both a surprise and a relief.

“You haven’t changed one bit,” Sol says, his voice muffled by Edward’s hair as Edward pulls him closer, twisting the fabric of Sol’s t-shirt between impatient fingers. “Always in a rush.” He reaches down between them, mouth curving into a smile when it causes Edward to strain against his palm. “Should I just take you up against that tree then?”

“We’re not… We’re not teens anymore. There could be ticks... snakes...” _And the heat is getting to my head_ , Edward thinks, rather desperately. _It feels like_ _the house is looking at me._

“Only ‘cause you’ve let this place run wild,” Sol says. “I’ll take my chances with the snakes.”

Edward doesn’t have any protest left in him. He doesn’t say another word as Sol goes down on both knees before him in the trampled grass, making quick work of his belt. It’s all he can do to keep his back to the house and his feet firmly planted in the ground, one hand on Sol’s shoulder and the other buried in his light-brown hair, just a few shades darker than the burnt grass, and he tries not to thrust into Sol’s mouth, no matter how overwhelming it gets. Would it feel so good, he wonders, if they’d been anywhere but here? Sol is as much a part of this place as the red dirt of the alley and the shingles of bald cypress wood and the warm air that goes down your throat like thick syrup.

He tries to hold back until he can’t anymore. It’s as untroubled as he’s ever felt, this moment of giving in, spilling down Sol’s throat without much of a warning save the brisk pull of his hand in Sol’s hair. He’d have fallen over if Sol hadn’t risen in time to catch him, letting Edward subside against his chest, his thoughts flurried and his legs gone weak, his eyes shut against the fading sun.

“I’m sorry… I just need a minute.”

“Let’s get you in. You and your northern constitution...”

Edward breaths out a winded laugh. This has got to be a terrible idea on the back of another bad one, but he used to think that the good ideas were the reasonable ones, and none of those have ever made him happy in the past.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


In the cooler shade of the house, with the shutters drawn against the fading heat of a cloudless afternoon, Edward shuts his eyes against his arm and lets Sol ride him until they’re both too spent to move another limb. In the aftermath, they lie naked in the single bed where Edward’s been sleeping since he came home, Sol slumped against Edward’s hip, the dark bulk of him infinitely comforting in the nightly disquiet of the house. Earlier it’d been easy to dismiss the creepings of unseen creatures and the weeping of old boards, all those cracks yawning wider by the hour as flakes of paint and plaster come off the walls and ceilings with a click and flutter down to rest on carpets thick with dust. For a time Edward couldn’t hear anything above the sparse language of grunts and deep exhales and creaking bed springs, and he’d give anything to drown out the false silence again. Pushing himself up on an elbow, he shoves the windowpane open and then the shutter, inviting in the first stirrings of the evening breeze.

“Everyone wants me gone,” he says, letting himself fall back against the pillow. “Even the house wants me gone.”

“Mm.” Sol shifts beside him. “You didn’t use to whine so much. City soften you up?”

“You don’t understand.” Edward worries his lip with his teeth, glancing out the window where the moon is poking out of the night like a yellow fingernail. “It’s this whole place wants me gone, can’t you feel it?”

Sol sits up. In the dark, the fair tones of his hair look blue, and he has that look that Edward remembers from the day in the truck when he’d said goodbye to him, all those years ago. That look like he’s trying to hold something back. “This your way of saying you’re gonna leave again, then?”

“What am I supposed to do? Beat the house into submission?”

“We both know that’s never gonna be the answer.”

Edward doesn’t need him to say anything else, knows what he’s thinking of - of Edward’s face black and blue under the neon light as he leaned over the sink in the trailer, Sol assessing the damage before he handed him a pack of frozen potato wedges.

“I don’t want to leave, but I’ve never been much of a fighter.”

“Liar,” Sol scoffs. “You gotta be the most resilient person I know. I’m damn sure you’re gonna outlive the rest of us. Worst comes to worst..." He closes his big arms around Edward so that he is held, warm and still, against Sol's chest. "You could always ask your preacher friend to come bless the house."

Even in the summer heat, Edward is grateful for the closeness, though Sol’s advice makes him frown. 

"Don't say it like that. Just because you don't have time for God or the Devil, doesn't mean neither have time for you."

"Well lookit you." Sol butts his head against Edward's cheek, pressing his mouth there for a moment in something that resembles a kiss. "Now you almost sound like one of us again."

"But I'm not though, am I? That's the problem." He traces a pattern on Sol's arm, more from memory than sight in the dark, but his fingers recall the path of an old tattoo, a coyote with its head thrown back, the moon between its jaws. It reminds him how they used to drive past the farms on autumn nights with the windows down, howling at the sky. Perhaps they were the devils all along.

Sol shifts behind him, breath close to Edward's ear. "Listen, it ain't the Devil you need to watch out for round here, it's the people. But I think you know that already."

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


Edward isn't sure if he dreams it, the laughter coming from the trees somewhere between midnight and waking, but morning brings a dead mockingbird on the front porch. 

"Shoot all the bluejays you want…" he mutters, picking it up with a pair of barbecue tongs.

"You want me to stay?" Sol already has one foot up on the board of his truck, cigarette poised halfway to his mouth, and his face never gives away much, but Edward knows he only hesitates with a smoke when something spooks him.

"It's fine, you should get going. Shop probably needs you… Ah, here. I’ve been carrying this around."

Sol pockets the check without looking at the amount.

“Keep that rifle at hand, yeah? Are the others coming to join you?”

“What others?”

Sol makes a decent effort at remembering the names and gives up along the way.

“James. Charlotte. The rest of the clan.”

“Oh.” Edward shakes his head. “No, no. It’s only me.”

“Get the rifle,” Sol says again, and raises a hand in farewell before he climbs into the truck.

Soon he’s driving away and Edward is left standing in the driveway, wearing the grey-green flannel he found in Ridley’s wardrobe, hanging loose over jeans he’d scraped the day before, trying to fix a hole in the roof of the back porch. 

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


Sol had dropped by one last time before Edward left for college, early one morning when the house was still asleep.

"You coming back down here for Thanksgiving then?” he’d asked, the engine still running in his truck as they lingered by the top of the driveway.

"Maybe not." The heat coming off the road made the air tremble. "Might stick around up there, try and get an internship. Do some work over the holidays."

Edward knew Sol was looking at him and so stared straight ahead, watching dust devils twirling on the dirt track. Sol had a kind of hum around him, like someone had drawn an outline of him in glitching dive bar neon, and it seemed to spark and fizzle like a bulb that was about to blow, but he never said anything except, "Well, see you round, I guess." He thumped Edward on the shoulder, and Edward said, "Right" and thumped him back, and then there was forty feet of distance between them and nothing to do but head in opposite directions. Edward didn't look back, walking up the drive, but before he reached the house he felt like someone was pulling his guts out a yard at a time.

For a long time afterwards, he felt as though they should have taken shots at each other with his grandfather's antique pistols, he should have howled Sol's name until the neighbours called the cops, cut off all his hair with the dull kitchen scissors, drank himself crazy (not unlike Irving these days, judging by the number of Jack Daniels bottles outside in the trash, and Edward doesn't have the heart to ask when that started, but he can't help wondering what's been going on here since he left). But in the end all he’d done was turn his back on the truck and then it was over.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


There’s a familiarity to seeing Sol leave that the past decade hasn’t erased, but whether it’s because Edward’s grown up or because he’s a bigger fool than he thought he was, it doesn’t hurt half as much as it used to.


	9. in a place like this

“Edward Little.” Bryant says it like he’s surprised to see him. “About time I ran into you.”

It takes Edward by surprise too. It’s been a long time since anyone in a police uniform called him by name, and the last was right back here in this town, years ago when he and Sol were almost arrested for stealing Clayton Evans’ scarecrow for target practice.

He could have made his own coffee this morning, but something about being alone in the house after it had felt so full of him and Sol the night before, it didn’t sit right with him. Not that the coffee at the diner is anything to write home about, but Edward has always liked the view; the industrial plants along the river glinting in the sun.

He walked in during the lazy couple of hours after the work rush, and the place was mostly empty. Only Sam Honey, the Creole cook built like a river barge, whistling through the kitchen hatch, and some skinny kid at the counter drawing on his arm with a biro – Young, Edward’s mind supplied. One of the Young siblings had been at school with Charlotte, and they all have that same look about them, like they’ve been living off old boot leather. The sheriff was sitting in the booth nearest the door with one of his deputies, a pensive woman whom Edward didn’t recognise.

“Hedges,” Bryant introduces her now, and getting to his feet he says, “Excuse us a moment, will you, Billie? I gotta have a word with Mr Little.”

Edward can’t think of any excuse fast enough. His mind is too full of dead mockingbirds and Sol’s hands. Stiffly, he orders one black coffee while the Young kid stares at him in silence, and then he retreats to the table in the corner with the sheriff only a couple of paces behind.

David Bryant is probably the last person he’d have expected to find with the silver star pinned on him. Edward hadn’t known him well exactly, back in school, but out of the twenty of them in class, if anyone had asked him to point out the rotten apple in the barrel, he’d have probably said David, as anyone else would have. Always splitting his knuckles and spitting out teeth, with the same pair of steel-toed boots his uncle had worn in Vietnam, or so he boasted. Not from a bad family, no, but his grandmother raised him on her own, and that can’t have been easy every day, folks said, what with her shifts at the hospital. There was one incident, way back, where he got into a fight with Edward’s brother James over some offence about his mother, and that was how Edward came to learn that Kathleen Bryant had gotten pregnant at fifteen, and had then left a few years later to marry some guy up in Canada. _“They’re growing trees, apparently,”_ Sarah Little had said, in what could have been a wistful tone.

There were times over the years when Edward would have liked to punch his brother too, but the kind of anger it takes to smash your fist to someone’s jaw, Edward’s never had it in him to pitch a fit like that. The man across from him now seems a world away from that kid they’d dragged off of James Little with blood on his chin – sheriff’s badge and a neat beard and no scabs on his knuckles, but still something about him that seems tight-wound. Perhaps that is the sort of person who makes a cop after all.

“I heard you been having some trouble,” Bryant says, “up at your folks’ old place.”

Edward glances at the counter where Young hastily busies himself wiping down the espresso machine. Maybe Sophia was onto something before – rumours do seem to travel faster than text messages around here.

“It’s nothing,” he replies, staring into his coffee. “Just kids messing around.”

“Mind if I sit?”

Edward hesitates, which the sheriff seems to take as an invitation. He drops into the seat across from him.

“You know, vandalism’s a criminal offence. You should have said something.”

His voice isn't unkind, but Edward takes a long sip of his coffee, glad to disappear behind the mug for a moment.

“I don’t know if it really counts as vandalism,” he says at last. “I mean, cats leave dead birds on the doorstep all the time.”

“What’s that now? I was talking about your car. You saying someone’s been leaving dead birds at your house?”

“Oh. No, I’m sure it’s just… You know. How it is around here.”

“Well I never find dead things on my doorstep. You got any idea who’d do something like that?”

Edward shakes his head. It was one thing to murmur it against Sol’s shoulder in the dark, quite another thing to voice it aloud in broad daylight to a man he barely knows. Deep down a thought has been nagging at him since he found those three sparrows on the porch: nobody leaves these things. They come and go with the shifting and settling of the house at night.

Instead he says, “Probably just people, you know. Bitter about my grandad.” The word feels the wrong shape in his mouth; it never did quite fit Old Si.

“That’s what you figure, is it?”

 _Well, what do you figure?_ he wants to say, but doesn’t dare, remembering the way James’ nose had bled for a full hour, all those years ago. This is starting to feel less like a happenstance conversation and more like Edward has been shanghaied, though he has no idea who might have put Bryant up to it. It’s not like they ever had any mutual friends, except perhaps Deputy Heather, back in the day – although he hadn’t been Edward’s friend, exactly, just the officer who didn’t arrest him for stealing a scarecrow. And that was probably only because Sol was standing next to him at the time.

“Look.” Bryant spreads his hands out on the table. “All I’m saying is, if someone’s messing with you, you should give us a call. That’s what we’re here for, ain’t it.”

Edward gives him a tight-lipped smile. “I’m fine, really.”

“Yeah well, I know self-defence ain’t exactly an issue for you up at the Gun House, but…you know. Folks round here got long memories, Little.”

It feels like they’ve taken a turn in the road, but tracking back, Edward can’t seem to figure out where. He gets the distinct impression they’re not talking about Old Si anymore.

Bryant is looking out of the window now. The sky has a bareness to it, the clouds scraped too thin; a stain along the horizon from the chemical plants. In the faint reflection of the glass Edward can see his expression, and there’s a certain helpless frustration to it, like the things he wants to say are too large to articulate. He remembers his own father looking the same way at times, and Edward feels slightly embarrassed, although he’s not sure who for.

Then Bryant says, “It’s not an easy thing, in a place like this.”

Before Edward has a chance to even pretend he knows what Bryant’s talking about, the door pings, and George Chambers stumbles in with Bobby Golding from the gas station, smelling of grass and exhaust fumes, their hair pasted to their foreheads from the heat.

“What time d’you call this?” Sam Honey sticks his head out of the hatch and gestures at the greasy clock overhead. His arms are speckled with shiny little scars from hot grease jumping at him all the years he’s been flipping patties, or catching himself on the pie oven door. “Thought you weren’t never coming in. Kid, you can go.”

Young, leaning on his elbows at the counter, straightens up with a groan. “Finally.” 

“Yeah, yeah.” Chambers waves him away as he throws on his apron. “Charlie Hartnell was showing us a deer skull they found in the river. Had the jawbone and everything.”

“He selling it?” Honey asks. “We could do something with that, put it on the sign by I-10. Make it look like it was eating something maybe.”

Deputy Hedges looks up from her coffee at Chambers. “Lord, boy, did you staple your bangs together?”

“Looks like shit, don’t it?” says Golding.

“Yeah well, the steam from the coffee machine kept making the tape fall off. Ain’t my fault my hair grows slow as a month of Sundays.”

Bryant, who has been looking over his shoulder since the door went, turns back now and says, “Suppose I better make tracks. Was good seeing you again, Little.”

 _A generous assessment,_ Edward thinks.

“I mean it though – that kind of shit happens again, you give the station a call. Ask for me, or Hedges. She’s got a good head on her.”

“Will do, Sheriff.”

Bryant shoots him a wry smile then. “Bet you never thought you’d be saying that.”

Edward nods a goodbye as the sheriff joins Hedges at the counter, where the deputy and the others are still berating Chambers.

“Come on, Billie, we better leave now if we wanna make it out to the Fairholme place and back before dark.” Bryant leaves a few crumpled bills and adds, “Hair looks nice, Georgie”, before heading out the door.

Chambers chews his thumbnail, staring after him, and Edward thinks about Bryant’s uncle, the one who fought in Vietnam, who drove a truck with NRA and Gadsden flag stickers covering the back window, whose boots young David had worn so proudly, and wonders that David Bryant should have changed so much, and that he himself should have changed so little. 

At the counter, Golding is saying, “It’s gonna be all kinds of wild, you should come.”

Chambers frowns. “I don’t even wanna know what you and Magnus Manson and his weirdo friends get up to in the woods, Bobby. Leave me out of it.”

The name hauls a memory to the surface of Edward’s mind. Magnus Manson asking around the boys at school, saying his father would pay them fifteen bucks if they helped get his herd loaded to take them over to Fort Worth for auction, and Edward saying sure, he’d come, because he knew Sol would be there, and it was a damn sight better than polishing pistols with his grandfather all weekend. Working all day in the heat with the flies and the stink of cattle making his eyes water, he remembers that clear as anything, and Magnus with his threadbare t-shirt and his little group of friends who looked even more frayed. All of them had liked Sol, maybe on account of Tozer Senior’s rodeo connections and him being comfortable around the animals – or maybe just because he was Sol. Whatever it was, Sol had slipped right in there like the coins Edward and Sophia used to press into the seams of the oak trees at the bottom of the yard for good luck. He fit in where Edward did not, although Sol himself was, in Edward’s mind, a cut above those strung-out kids with the stick-and-poke tattoos and lazy buzzcuts.

Edward watches Golding leave, and perhaps it’s this connection – an old-time twinge in his chest that he refuses to call jealousy – that prompts him to ask, as he pays for his coffee, “What was that about Magnus Manson and the woods?”

Chambers sighs heavily, handing Edward his change. “Lord, don’t ask me. All I know is Bobby’s been out there a couple times now, comes back crazier than a sprayed roach.”

“Crazy?”

“Yeah, talking like _You ever see the breath of a god in the air?_ Now what the hell’s that supposed to mean?”


	10. a lonely man

"James,” says Dundy, “you're a hick."

"Oh, I know." James Fitzjames smiles down at himself, rather proud. "Don't I look the part?"

“Every inch. But really, James… farming?”

Dundy has come all the way down from Massachusetts, looking like a summer edition of himself, slouchy linen trousers and big sunglasses that cover most of his face. Still, James can tell his old friend is slightly aghast at the state in which he’s found him – in a sweat-stained shirt with his hair flattened under a broad-brimmed straw hat, trousers rolled up to his knees, barefoot in the warm soil, leaning on a rake like he expects to be using it, with his hands, to do something agricultural to the ground that sinks in under Dundy’s expensive gator skin boots.

“I figured you were going to do the place up and flip it. Or turn it into one of those spa getaways – tranquility of the bayou, get back to nature, that sort of thing?"

"Get back to nature? Dundy, you're such a hypocrite."

"You know what I mean."

James shifts his weight against his rake. A little V of ducks flies overhead, calling to each other, and the trees stir as the mossy breeze comes up off the river, like the place is making itself comfortable before settling back down again.

"I don't know. I rather like it here."

Across the field, Francis Crozier is digging a furrow to plant next year's cane crop. He pauses, straightening up to sip from his flask, and James waves at him. Crozier looks over his shoulder briefly, as if he were expecting James to be waving to somebody else, and James must be smiling because Dundy says,

"Absolutely not."

They retire inside for lunch, Dundy’s powder-grey forelock wilting in the humidity, James’ bare feet leaving dusty prints on the cool tiled floor. The Franklins took all their furniture away with them when they left, so the two men lounge in the foyer in a pair of ancient lawn chairs, drinking sweet tea and eating grapes and pão de queijo, which James made himself when he woke early in the morning craving something decently Brazilian. The windows are so old the glass has dipped and pooled in the frames, and they are hard to open, so James lights a joss stick to move the air around a bit. The Franklins took good care of this place, but it still has a stuffiness to it, like it’s been lived in too long, and James is aware that this isn’t his home yet. Just walls and a roof that he owns. 

He lets Dundy do most of the talking; he’s one of the few people with whom James can be quiet without feeling uncomfortable. Dundy tells him about the hotel he’s staying at over in New Orleans: the sheets aren’t a hundred percent cotton, he can tell, and he sweats all night. Usually he loves falling asleep to the sound of music ringing in the streets below, but this morning he woke up to find a spider the size of his hand on the ceiling, and he loved that a lot less. "It’s a long way from Boston," James says, and Dundy nods solemnly.

His visit to James is incidental. Massachusetts has been home ever since his family clambered off the Mayflower, but four hundred years is a long time, and officially he’s in Cajun country looking for whoever it was between then and now gave his family the distinctly non-Devonshire surname Le Vesconte.

“You ever think about looking into it?”

“What?” says James.

“Family history.”

“Dundy.”

“I know, I know. But what if you’ve got a fabulous Portugese grandmother somewhere, eh? She could be fattening you up to within an inch of your life right now, instead of you sitting on patio furniture in an empty house.”

“Don’t pretend you don’t like my patio furniture.” James smiles. “Reminds me of that awful apartment we had in Queens.”

“Oh, don’t. The one with the rats?”

“The one with that guy who grew pot on the roof.”

“Glorious times.”

“Exactly.”

Dundy shakes his head. “I just worry about you, is all. Can’t help it.” He crosses one alligator boot over the other, shooting James a familiar smile. “You know what you should do, spice things up a little?”

“I won’t hear another criticism about my lawn chairs.”

“A party, James! You used to put on a hell of a time. I remember I was still drunk a full week after your twenty-seventh.”

James very much doubts Dundy does remember that, but he doesn’t hate the idea. Two weeks he’s been here already; perhaps it would be wise to meet the neighbours properly at last. The South is big on manners, or so he’s heard.

He knows most of the folks in town by sight now – the sullen, dark-haired young man who lives alone in that crumbling manor further upriver; the weary preacher with his dog collar always undone and his sleeves rolled up to the elbows; the two brothers who came by in their trawler the day he arrived, stamping their bare feet on the deck and hollering about how it was bad luck to move into a new house on the 13th; that one-legged fella who owns the general store and who'll spit in the dirt as soon as look at you; the grim-faced sheriff who always smells heavily of coffee. And then of course there's Francis, who gets up early when the world is still silver with pre-dawn, and wanders through the fields in his stained wax jacket, swigging from a hip flask every now and then, and glancing mournfully back at his farmhouse like he's hoping to see something different waiting for him.

What is he looking for, James wonders? What are either of them looking for out here? The landscape unfolds all around them, hickories and cypresses and reems of Spanish moss, creeks and riverland and miles of ground choked with sugarcane, old bones and rusted farming equipment, a huge sky full of towering columns of cloud overhead; James feels reduced to a fingersnap. Rio was becoming too crowded, seemed like he could hardly turn a corner without being confronted with some memory of his father. He thought the vastness of this place would bring him some peace of mind, but having Dundy here now, he realises how much he has missed the noise of other people. He has always been a lonely man, but he has never really been alone before.

“You’ll have to scrape together some proper cutlery, of course,” Dundy says. “Can’t have people eating with their hands.”

“I don’t know, there’s a certain Roman dignity to it.”

“You could host it out in the yard so no one notices you’ve got no furniture. And only invite fabulous people, James, not that old soak across the field.”

“Francis? Oh no, I can’t not invite Francis.”

James says this with such certainty that he surprises himself as much as he does Dundy. It’s not as though he and Francis have exchanged more than two words since he arrived, and those were hardly friendly, besides, but James has grown used to the sight of him every morning, tossing back his whiskey and fixing James with his narrow-eyed glare. He’s become a fixture, sitting there on his porch; James feels like he could navigate by him. In that sense, he supposes, he is not as alone as he thought. Francis Crozier is hardly the cacophony of New York or Boston or Rio – or any of the other places James has holed up in in the last three decades – but a lonesome note plucked on an old guitar, and James is content to fit his own rhythm around it.


	11. scar tissue

The afternoon is already dying out by the time Billy Gibson arrives. The sound of the car door slamming shut startles John out of his thoughts, one hand flying to his upper arm, as tends to happen these days when he’s caught by surprise. There’s no raised scar tissue to be felt under his palm, the old puncture mark has healed without leaving much of a trace, but sometimes he could swear the bite still tingles. 

Weeks after they’d discharged him from the hospital, he’d run into the local veterinarian at the general store and Harry had quietly asked John how he was feeling, had wanted to take a look at the wound. “ _How did you say it happened?”_ John had repeated the same lie he’d told at the hospital, about how he’d been tending to his beehives and the snake had struck, no rattle no fuss, as he reached under one of the hives to retrieve a crate. “ _You’re lucky the Hartnells got you to the hospital in time,”_ Harry had said. “ _I’m sorry I brought this up… You must be trying to put this whole adventure behind you.”_

John hadn’t dared say what was on his mind, namely that, much as he’d have liked to “put the whole adventure behind him,” he keeps thinking of snakes whenever he lets his mind wander, black-spotted, copper-tinged rattlesnakes like the one that bit him, and it ain’t no Bible verse that accompanies these gliding visions but the old saying, “Don’t bite the hand that feeds you.”

“Anyone home?” Billy calls from the gravel track in front of the church.

“Coming,” John answers. On his way out, he unhooks the ladder from the wall by the door.

Billy is standing idly next to his truck, his gaunt face turned away from the light and towards the heavy rain clouds gathering on the horizon. 

“Pastor John, I should have come sooner, I’m sorry.” For such a tall man, Billy is surprisingly unobtrusive, and his voice is in accordance with his demeanour, soft and almost smothered. “I was in the woods, a friend needed my help cutting some trees.”

 _Oh, I’m sure you were in the woods,_ John thinks. _But there ain’t a doubt in my mind you weren’t cutting no damn trees._

It’s one thing to think it and another to share it. For all that Billy never misses a Sunday service at John’s church, John’s never found a way to have a frank conversation with the man. The both of them are holding back. Sometimes it seems to John they might be hiding the same secrets.

“If you show me where the hole is, I’ll get it fixed before sundown,” Billy says, as he leans through the open window of the dusty green truck to retrieve first his tool belt, then a few pieces of corrugated iron and a small can of roof cement. “You said it was hand-sized, I hope one of these will be large enough,” he adds, lifting the bits of metal sheeting for John’s inspection.

“There’s a few sheets left behind the church, from when your father redid the roof.” John leads the way around the church through the tall grass, carrying the ladder. “I really appreciate your help. I’m not much good with these things.”

While Billy works he remains at the foot of the ladder, holding it in place. They exchange a bit of talk, the odds and ends of Billy’s life and of life in the town - Billy’s aunt came down to see his father’s grave, Billy’s found quite a bit of work this summer building tool sheds and fixing porches, but in the fall he thinks he’ll go back to work at the factory, the work was steady and it paid better, even if it ain’t what he thought he’d be doing in life, clocking in, clocking out, among the din of machinery and with the light filtered through the dust on the tall windows, nothing like the woods of his childhood. His father had always had a good eye for trees. They buried him in a fine oak casket William Gibson Sr had made with his own hands, some weeks before he passed.

“My mother’s not doing too well,” Billy says, a euphemism for how ill Amelia Gibson has been, enough so that John’s already been called at the house twice for what Amelia and her son believed would be a final visit. “I’d find work at the lumber yard if it wasn’t so far from home.”

John is used to hearing the confidences and confessions of his congregation. Only this morning, Jane Franklin had dropped by to talk about her many projects for the church fair, to complain about _“that young sheriff, who should spend more time looking into the strange goings-on at the Helena and less time at Sam Honey’s diner - this is how our heritage slips through our fingers, Pastor John, when we look away and let vagrants burn down our houses, and I think next Sunday you might want to say a word about this in your sermon, I shall see if I can convince the Fairholmes’ neighbours to attend the service, the Hodgson boy and Edward Little, although we’d be better off if any of his sisters had come home instead of him, the women in that family have always had a better head for business. That girl Jane is in charge of the family company now, do you know? I firmly believe a woman should make a life for herself, it’s what I’ve always encouraged Sophia to do, although I have to admit I hoped she’d take a liking to James, the young man we sold the farm to, it would have made things easier, but if this life has taught me one thing -”_ and she’d nodded sagely, she who’d hardly ever known any more troublesome hardship than her husband’s discrete eviction from his job once rumors of his corruption had surfaced, _“God always tests the best souls the hardest.”_

“Do tell your mother I’ll be happy to see her,” John calls up to Billy. “Anytime she likes.”

“She’ll appreciate it. If this was twenty years ago… There used to be this little sawmill in the woods near our house, I could have worked there. But it’s just rotting timbers now. Not even a window left for the local kids to break.”

John hesitates, but Billy has brought up the woods himself, and he feels duty-bound to try and keep the conversation going. Gently he shrugs his shoulder, trying to shake the phantom ache of that snake bite. Billy wasn’t there the day John wandered into those woods - it was only the abandoned saw mill and the trees all around, oak and pine, and the devil himself standing among the weeds, beckoning him with a smile and a hand raised in welcome, the rattlesnake wrapped in a leisurely coil around his narrow shoulders.

“In those woods...” he begins, and stops, the words caught in his throat. Tom told him it wasn’t wise to meddle. “ _Anyone can get bit by a snake, but it’s only a damn fool gets bitten twice.”_

“I’m about done here,” Billy says. Raising his head, he looks beyond the roof to where John can’t see. “There’s a big storm coming. If you find water in the aisle again, you let me know, I’ll come have another look.”

“Thank you,” John says, and keeps a tight grip on the ladder as Billy climbs down.

Suddenly he wants nothing more than for Billy to be gone. There’s half a bottle of Jim Beam waiting for him in his kitchen cupboard, or perhaps he’ll drive to that ramshackle bar, where they know his order so well by now that the bartender has poured the drink before he’s even done walking in.

“Otherwise, I’ll see you Sunday,” Billy says.

Tall scarecrow of a man, with his cornflower-blue eyes. John can’t reconcile what he knows of Billy Gibson, hard-working, helpful Billy, serious and quiet, with that place in the woods, the stories he’s heard and what he witnessed himself: the rattlesnakes and the impassioned whispers, the lost souls flocking to the wrong shepherd.

“Yes.” Impulsively, he reaches for Billy’s arm. “Do come Sunday. Or anytime you need to talk.”

Billy sounds sincere as he thanks him, and he even musters a thin smile before he turns around and carries his tools back to the truck. And yet, as John walks back to the church, the storm close on his heels, raindrops falling in his dark hair and dripping down the back of his neck, he can’t help but feel that he’s failed the man somehow. These days, it seems like there might just be too much doubt in him; and if that is the case, how can he bolster anyone else’s faith?


	12. with the light on

“I’m glad you came,” Edward mumbles, as Sol kisses him, Edward’s fingers winding in his damp hair. Sol gently pushes the rifle aside. Edward had fallen asleep with it still in his hands, in one of the armchairs in the living-room, the one in the corner facing the front door. The rain hammers against the roof and Sol smells of the nearby river, of water left to linger too long in crevices in the rock and in the knotwork of roots. Under Edward’s fingers the soft tangle of Sol’s beard might as well be Spanish moss. Edward kisses him as he’s wanted to for weeks, for years, drowsily, tenderly, like perhaps this time they’ll be allowed to discover each other without fear of a sudden interruption.

“I missed this,” Edward admits. “How you’d climb through my window to ravish me in my sleep.”

Sol makes a sound low in his throat, like surprised laughter. His knee on Edward’s thigh pins him to the armchair, and later when he removes his pants there’ll be the red premise of a bruise upon his leg.

 _Little signs of madness_ , his mother used to say, when Edward’s grandmother accused ghosts of moving her silverware around, when they found Edward’s father at the back of the garden with his rifle in his hands, standing on his own two feet although he was fast asleep. 

When Edward pulls the cord of the lamp on the table by the chair, Sol is still half-sitting on him - his hands on Edward’s flushed skin, his tongue in Edward’s mouth - and yet when the light flashes on, the living-room is empty but for its usual, liveless clutter. The only presence aside from Edward’s quickened breathing is the clatter of the rain on the metal roof of the porch.

“Little signs of madness,” Edward whispers, hating the way his voice quivers as he picks up the rifle and holds it close to his chest. The room smells of moss and damp, like he’s just been wading through a swamp.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


“A bad dream,” Sol repeats. Edward can picture his smile, that faint crease at the corner of his mouth. “Poor boy.”

“I’m sure it’ll sound just as ridiculous to me in the cold light of day,” Edward grumbles, reaching for the glass of whiskey on the pedestal table. _I wasn’t even sleeping,_ he wants to scream, but he knows better. During his second year of college he’d tried to tell his girlfriend about those episodes, and the look on her face had taught him a lesson.

“What are you up to? Did I wake you up?”

“No,” Sol says. “I’m at the Shack with the rest of the shop.”

Now that Sol’s mentioned the bar, Edward does pick up a thin thread of night sounds at his back. Passing cars, the diffuse music of the jukebox when the door opens or closes. Sol must have come out for a smoke, unless he rushed out to answer his phone.

“Do you need me to come over?”

There’s enough amusement in his voice that Edward bristles.

“There’s no need. I don’t know why I called you. Have a good night.”

Sol huffs.

“Don’t fall asleep on that rifle,” he says.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


Edward is hardly surprised when he hears the knock on the door, a half-hour later. By this point, he’s more afraid of the house itself than of any nightly visitors, and he’d been pondering whether he should leave, unable to decide if that would make things better or worse and where he should go, wondering if he should call Charlotte or Sophia and if either of them would make fun of him or, worse, take him seriously. The knock is followed by a warning call.

“Don’t shoot me!”

Edward exhales in relief.

“Someone’s missed me,” Sol notes, when the door opens and Edward falls against him, shoulders gone slack and with his arms dangling at his sides like he’s been tossed at Sol by a malignant wind. 

The rain continues to beat down on the roof but the house is blessedly silent as they fumble into bed, Edward clinging to every part of Sol he can reach.

“There, there. That’s it. I’ve got you, I’ve got you.”

If Sol’s voice reminds Edward of anything it’s of the whiskey he’s drunk, the softest burn, and he’d swallow it if he could, let it slide down his throat. He’d be ashamed of how little time it takes for him to surrender to Sol’s hands, but he’s left his pride downstairs, with the rifle maybe, and he bucks his hips and moans as Sol works him up, jerks him off, feeling all of seventeen again for how good it feels and how soon it ends, with him coming in Sol’s tight grip, lips parted on a tenuous gasp.

“Feeling better?” Sol mumbles.

Edward nods.

Sol smells strongly of cigarettes and faintly of beer, and his hair is still damp from the rain, but he doesn’t smell like stagnant water, and this time Edward can see him - his dark eyes and the curve of his nose and the faint dimple of his smile.

“D’you want me to stay?” Sol asks.

“Yeah.”

Edward fits himself against him, letting Sol pull the blanket over them both. In what might be his kindest gesture yet, Sol doesn’t ask Edward why he seems so set on sleeping with the light on.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


That night he dreams that he is walking alone through the house, but it is not quite as he remembers it: all the rooms are empty and there seems to be more than he’s ever counted before. A dream, he tells himself. But he keeps on walking, and every corridor has a bend, and every window is closed against the pitch black night.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


In the morning, Edward wakes to the smell of cornbread rising from the kitchen. He hasn’t had cornbread since he left home, hadn’t much felt like it. Ridley had tried to replicate their mother’s recipe once, in the shared kitchen of his campus when Edward was visiting, but they’d messed it up and the kitchen had smelled like curdled milk for the remainder of Edward’s stay.

Sol is sitting at the head of the table where Eliza used to sit, she’d fought James tooth and nail for that right, being the oldest but also, as James liked to remind her, “a boring girl who’ll get married someday.” The freshly-baked cornbread with its golden crust lies in its cast-iron skillet in the middle of the table; Sol’s already taken a sizable bite out of it. Now he’s rifling through an old-fashioned Hayter gun catalogue that he’s found god knows where.

“Tommy Armitage’s taken over his father’s store,” Sol says, in lieu of a hello. “If you ever feel like selling some of that firepower.”

Edward is about to say that the guns in the house are collectors’ items, that he certainly won’t sell them a tenth of their price at the Armitages’ hunting and fishing store, when he realises, first how painfully stuck-up he’d sound, and then that he would actually enjoy that kind of nose-thumbing. If it were up to him, Tommy Armitage could come and take his pick of the guns in Old Si’s office. Edward might even let him cart them off for free. 

“Can’t,” he says instead, pulling out a chair and dropping into it. Maybe it’s the baking, but the room feels too warm, and he wishes he hadn’t bothered getting dressed before he came down. Sol certainly didn’t, sitting there sprawled in his jeans and nothing else, hazel brown hair sticking up every which way. Edward’s eyes drift towards the bullet scar on Sol’s shoulder, and then down towards the thick-lined coyote on his forearm, before he returns to staring at the grain of the table. The reason why Eliza could choose where to sit was that it was only ever the children eating in the kitchen, the children and Wendy. Sometimes, he almost misses those meals, which could be a lot livelier than any larger family interaction. 

“The guns aren’t mine to sell,” he explains. “Can I?” 

At Sol’s nod, Edward gets up to grab a plate and fork. 

“Thank you,” he ventures.

“Don’t get used to it,” Sol says, without looking up from his catalogue. “Still not much of a cook, I take it.”

“That was years ago,” Edward says, with a tentative smile.

“We almost died.”

Edward rolls his eyes as he accepts the coffee pot. 

Sol isn’t entirely wrong. There’d been flames. When Edward thinks about that morning - critters whistling in the weeds, blue mist rising between the trailers - it’s not so much details that come to mind but rather a general feeling of nervousness. At the time, he’d thought that was what freedom was supposed to taste like, when you’re seventeen and you’ve finally decided to ditch your crazy family to hitch yourself to a boy you like. In retrospect, it might have been a reluctant awareness that this strange domesticity simply couldn’t last: Edward getting up early to prove he could earn his keep, sweeping the floors and cleaning all cooking surfaces and doing several days’ worth of dishes, finally trying to cook them a rabbit and setting fire to the trailer. _“Ain’t gonna be raw, at least,”_ Sol had mused, as he picked through the charred remain of the rabbit with his oven mitts.

“Sheriff came to talk to me,” Edward says. “At the diner, yesterday.”

Though he searches Sol’s face, he doesn’t find much there to read. 

“What did David Bryant want with you?”

“Wanted to know if I needed some help. With the… The birds and all. Wasn’t you put him up to it, then?”

Sol shakes his head. “I don’t have nothing to say to him, and he doesn’t talk to me much either. Deputy Heather got him his job, d’you know that? Before he passed.”

“I didn’t know that. About Heather, I mean. I’m sorry. You liked him, I remember that.”

“Yeah.” 

Sol remains silent for a bit and Edward is ready to let it go, when Sol speaks again, hesitantly this time.

“Picked me up after he’d caught me busting a bus stop. I was what, fifteen? Saw that sheriff car pull up. I thought he was gonna arrest me, but we ended up in the swamps, shooting ducks from one of them hunting shacks.” Sol imitates Heather’s gruff tone of voice. “ _‘Put you in a more contemplative mood, son.’_ He had what, seven years on me? Eight? When I was a kid I used to see him knocking back beers at the Shack. Back when my father owned the Shack, before he gambled the deed and lost it... And then he went back to riding bulls and biting the dust and getting bitten by snakes in the great state of Texas.” He shakes his head. “Heather was the only one ever called me that. ‘Son,’ like he smelled the need for a father on me. And my ma was still around at the time - that was years before you came by, there was what, five of us in that trailer, she got another kid or two after that, when she moved to Florida with her new man. Yeah, Deputy Heather, that was someone.”

Edward doesn’t say anything, in case Sol’s got another story to share, but nothing comes and so he finishes his breakfast in silence, thinking of that trailer, of how it had meant freedom for him and of what it might have meant for Sol, when he had to share it with that mess of a family first and then with no one at all, something like loneliness, maybe, before and after.

“What happened to him? Deputy Heather?”

“Cancer,” Sol says, and they leave it at that.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


After Sol has left for the shop, Edward clears the remains of their breakfast and does the dishes, and once he’s done that he retrieves whatever cleaning supplies he can find from the cabinets under the sink and cleans the kitchen tiles. He’s halfway through scraping the grit off a window when he realises he’s got no idea what he’s doing, and by mid-morning he’s gone hunting in the drawers of his mother’s writing desk, and found Wendy’s number.


	13. drill a hole in a dime

That afternoon finds Tom Hartnell at Thomas Blanky’s General Store, chewing tobacco at the counter with Francis Crozier, feeling the grit on the sun-warmed floorboards under his bare feet.

“A garden party,” Crozier scoffs, leaning against the register as Blanky adds up the morning’s earnings. A few feet away, the kid who’s in charge of shelving everything from spades and screws to the dusty, inflatable pool toys is trying to fix a broken postcard display. Tom knows it’s one of Jimmy Evans’ brood but he’ll be damned if he can keep all those eager-faced, curly-haired boys’ names straight.

“I mean, where does he think he is,” Crozier snorts, “Versailles?”

Tom gives a short grunt of a laugh, and the Evans boy looks up as if worried they might have been laughing at him.

“Garden parties used to be popular round here, back in the day,” Blanky points out. “You know, around the time your friend Edward’s ancestors were selling their guns on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line.”

Blanky, while he has nothing against the current Mr Little, is no fan of the family, having lost his leg in a disagreement with Old Si and a .44. Or at least that's how one version of the story goes. Others say he got into a scrap with a grizzly when he was working the timber land up in British Columbia. Then there's a version where he got bit by a gator while helping the Hartnell boys shoo it off their boat (Tom knows that one ain’t true, but he’s got no complaints being a part of any tall tale that involves Thomas Blanky.) Or was it that he got run over by his own truck when Crozier left it in neutral by mistake, that night they both got blind drunk on Henry Collins' moonshine? Whichever version of the story you hear, it's likely Blanky started the rumour himself.

“So you gonna go?” Tom asks. “You know your Mr Fitzjames asked me and Johnny to play banjo? Like, he didn’t even ask us if that’s what we played, he just assumed.”

“Yeah, well,” says Blanky, looking at Tom’s hand-me-down overalls and fraying straw hat. “If you’re gonna go round dressed like Huckleberry Finn, boy, don’t be surprised when city folk think you’re country.”

He smiles at Tom fondly, all teeth, and Tom grins back.

“Guess I’ll do it anyway,” he says. “Fitzjames said he’d make it worth our while, and we could do with the cash. Boat needs fixing, and Johnny’s still getting them aches in his bones.”

“Well if you two are going,” Crozier grumbles. “Suppose I could put in an appearance.”

“There you go, Francis.” Blanky reaches over the counter and slaps his shoulder. “Be good for you to enjoy yourself once in a while.”

“I said I’d go. Didn’t say I’d enjoy it.”

Tom leaves them to their bickering, blinking as he steps out into the dusty brightness of Main Street. The afternoon heat makes it feel like he’s climbing into someone’s mouth. Above the road, the stop lights swing lazily, flashing yellow for the end of the school day, although there’s hardly any traffic to warn, just a couple of trucks parked outside the pharmacy across the street and a few folks fanning themselves with their hands as they cross the parking lot outside the diner, heading for the relief of the AC in their cars.

Tom heads towards the water tower where he parked Johnny’s pick-up, keeping to the stunted dead grass at the side of the road where there’s less chance of ticks and the ground is cooler on his bare soles. He almost bumps into Edward Little coming the other way, sweating like a sinner in church. The poor man looks rough-edged, like he’s been catching all his sleep on his feet and not getting much of it neither.

“Hey,” says Tom. “Been a hot minute since I seen you.”

“Hey yourself.” Edward’s smile is wary.

“You going to Blanky’s? Only, he’s closing up early.”

“Oh, no, I’m just… Cigarettes. I’ll get them at the gas station in that case. How’ve you been? How’s your brother?”

“Johnny? Oh yeah, he’s okay. Tell you what, he knew you were coming back to town before Bobby Golding even got a glimpse of you. Couple weeks ago his right hand was itching like crazy, and he said he’d bet the whole boat it was you coming home after all these years.”

When Edward doesn’t say anything, Tom adds, “You know, when your hand’s itching? Means you’re gonna see someone you ain’t seen in a long time?”

“Right. Of course.”

“Yeah well anyway, he figured it had to be you. Ain’t many folks make it out of here alive.”

Edward folds his lips together, nods slowly. The house beside them has an AC unit sticking out of the window, and the whir seems to expand to fill the silence.

At last Edward says, “Well, I’d best be getting on. Good to see you again, Tom. Say hi to your brother for me.”

Tom waits for him to move, but he only stands there, worrying the rivets in the pockets of his jeans.

“You alright?”

“Oh sure. Hey listen, Tom, you’re a friend of Pastor John’s, right? Do you know what’s been troubling him lately?”

“How’d you figure I’m friends with him?”

“Oh. No, it’s just that I’ve seen your truck outside the church a few times since I’ve been back. I just thought…”

“Right, yeah. We’re friends.”

“So do you know what’s eating him? Since I got back he seems… I don't know. He won’t say two words about it to me.”

Tom’s never been one for secrets. Growing up with four siblings, privacy was an unknown currency, so he don’t much care who knows what about him, so long as he knows they know. But this is different. John is somebody in this town, his reputation matters. His secrets matter. 

Tom leans closer, touches a finger to his eyebrow. “Pastor’s got the devil on his back. I told him: drill a hole in a dime and wear it round your neck. That’ll scare the Old Fella off.”

Even if he were inclined to talk about it, he’d be hard pressed to say if the drinking is its own secret, or if it has arisen to cover up the other shame that John Irving carries around with him. They don’t talk about it much. But sometimes, when the sweat is still cooling on their bodies, John leaves his little rooms out back and goes to sit in the church for a while. And Tom knows then that it isn’t the devil looming over him, so much as the very human shadow of his own congregation.

The AC in the window whines. Edward looks at him curiously. “A dime? Would that scare off the folks who slashed my tires too?”

Tom laughs. “I’d have thought one of your pistols would do that just fine.”

“Right.”

“Hey.” Tom leans back, thumbs hooked in the belt loops of his overalls. “I hear you got haints in your head.”

“I’ve got what now?”

“Ghosts. You know? You wanna read your Bible backwards and sleep up the other end of your bed to usual.”

Heat makes the air above the blacktop shimmer and dance. Edward’s black hair is sticking to his forehead like India ink running from his scalp, his mouth turned down at the corners, shoulders dipping, as if the very outline of him is falling prey to the climate.

“Who’s been telling you that?”

“No one,” Tom lies. “Just what I heard.”

Edward swallows. “I should be getting on. Be seeing you, Mr Hartnell.”

He looks over his shoulder twice as he walks away. Tom waves but Edward doesn’t seem to see him, seems to be looking beyond him, back into the trees, and Tom crosses himself, sets off towards the truck quick as he can. John may not have a devil on his back, he thinks, but the Old Fella’s clinging to Edward Little sure enough.


	14. no kind of religion

“She knows he stole them, she just can’t prove it, and I was thinking that maybe you could... Hey, Eddie, are you listening to me?”

“Don’t call me Eddie,” Edward answers drowsily, without opening his eyes. It’s cooler than yesterday and he’s slowly been falling asleep to the creak of the porch swing.

“Did you listen to a word I said?” Sophia frowns.

“Someone stole snakes from the clinic at the animal sanctuary. Your friend Silna thinks it was a man called Hickey.”

“We know it was him. We just can’t prove it.”

“And you thought I could help...how?”

Sensing some apprehension in her silence, Edward opens his eyes. “What is it?”

“I thought you could ask Tozer... Tozer would know. He was down there all the time before you came back. At _La Mélodie_.”

“The Hodgson house? Golly, where is George these days?”

He catches himself just in time before asking, _And just what has Sol been doing downriver anyhow?_

“George comes and goes since he inherited the place,” Sophia shrugs. “Mainly it’s a four-star squat for Hickey and his friends. And quite possibly, a reptile room as well? Or that’s what Silna suspects.”

"Huh," says Edward. He sits up now, swatting away a bluebottle. "Well, I can't see Sol would have much to do with snakes."

Sol’s old man had taken a copperhead to the ankle when he was ranching in Texas and the snake spooked his horse bad enough to throw him. As good as burned his insides out, or at least that’s what the ranch owner told Sol over the phone, and Edward remembers sitting next to him when he took that call, thinking that was no way to speak to someone who’d just lost their father. _I’m sure your dad was worth more than a phone call_ , he said, and Sol had replied, _I’m sure he weren’t even worth the energy it took to dial_. No, Sol has no good love of snakes.

“He’s never mentioned this Hickey guy to me before.”

Edward busies his hands first with his cigarettes and then with an invisible speck of lint on his wrinkled trousers. The family maid might have returned – Wendy, with her soft brown eyes and that slow gait, who’d once let Edward hide under her skirts to avoid a scolding from whichever angry Little was after him – but she’s got enough to take care of, the house being in the kind of state it’s in, without adding Edward’s ironing to the list.

“What kind of a man is he?” he asks, at long last.

Sophia seems to consider this. “Unsavoury,” she says. “With something of the snake about him, or the eel... He’s got himself a little congregation, mostly the poor folks who live out beyond _La Mélodie_ , and a few of the families in those big houses after the fork in the river, the rotting ones. The Hodgsons, the Des Voeux... He does his preaching in the woods over there.”

Edward nods; he knows the place she means, though he can’t remember what it’s called, and nothing much beyond that fork in the river has ever had a name. At some point, folks got out that far and just gave up.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


Later that afternoon, on his way back from dropping Sophia home, Edward hesitates at a stop sign, before swinging left towards the church (and away from the trailer park). John is out front, fitting little black letters to the dusty board, while Tom Hartnell mows the long grass, stopping every now and then to toss away loose rocks and bits of antler.

“ _Are you going to Heaven?_ ” Edward reads off the sign. “That’s a hell of a question for a Tuesday afternoon.”

“Well, that’s the point.” John stands, dusting his hands off on his trousers. “What can I do for you, Edward?”

“I wondered if you’d heard anything about this revival church out in the woods? Sophia tells me they’ve been stealing snakes from the nature reserve. Some guy called Hickey, I think it was.”

John stiffens. “That so?”

“You know it then.” Edward watches his friend’s hand fidgeting at his side.

“I didn’t say that. What I do know is that theft, snakes or otherwise, is a matter for the sheriff, not the church. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a lot to get on with.”

“No rest for the wicked?”

Edward tries to smile at him, but John only shoves his hands in his pockets and looks away.

“John, what’s the matter? You had a run in with this guy or something?”

“Hey.”

Hartnell steps up beside them suddenly, puts a hand on John’s shoulder, which, to Edward’s surprise, he does not shake off.

“You wanna know about the church in the woods? I can tell you.”

“You know it?”

“Been around there once or twice, sure.”

“So you got any idea what they’d be using snakes for?”

Hartnell squints at him from under the brim of his straw hat. “You been up north so long you ain’t never heard of snake-handling?”

“It’s no kind of religion,” John mutters, and he turns and stalks back towards his own little church, scuffing up yellow dirt as he goes.

Hartnell turns to Edward and shakes his head. “It’s religion alright. It’s just a different kind of god they get on their knees for.”

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


Driving back through town, Edward spots Sol stacking a couple of liquor crates in the back of his truck outside Blanky’s General Store, and as he pulls up alongside, Sol wipes his hands on his jeans and breaks into a grin.

“Hey, where you been?”

“Oh you know.” Edward tries not to look directly at him, or he won’t be able to go through with being mad at him. “Here and there.”

“Well it seems like you been here and there a lot.” Sol’s laugh comes easily. “Couldn’t get hold of you lately. You okay? Them kids been leaving things on your doorstep again?”

Edward shakes his head. Sol’s caught the sun on the bridge of his nose and his hair is streaked with yellow like a bayou sunrise, and Edward wants to share that easy laugh and take him home and climb into his lap. But churches in the woods and snakes and hellfire preaching, Edward can’t get it out of his head, and that’s never seemed like his Sol. That, he figures, is why he’s really mad at him – the thought of not knowing the only person who’s ever really known him, that about cuts Edward in two.

“That’s a lot of whiskey you’ve got there,” he says.

“Ain’t no crime in it.”

“You going to drink all sixteen bottles yourself?”

Sol gives him a strange look. “You got something you wanna say, Edward?”

“You’re not taking all that over to the Hodgson place? Because I hear you’ve been out there a lot.”

Sol looks about as happy as a bear peppered full of buckshot. “Dammit, Edward.”

“I’m right, then.”

“You don’t know what you’re right about. God _dammit_.”

He kicks his boot heel into the dirt, sending up a spray of dust. They’re the same cowboy boots he’s been wearing since Edward first met him, and they weren’t even white back then, always a kind of dirty nothing colour, applique come loose on the left ankle, worn to the quick on the right heel because Sol favours that leg when he walks. In a sudden panic he wonders what he’s going to do with all these details if Sol finishes with him right here on the spot.

But he takes Edward by the shoulder, and lowering his voice he says, “That place ain’t what you think, you gotta promise me you won’t go poking around looking to start something. I can’t be watching your back every hour of the day.”

“Start something? What would I be starting? Sophia said –”

“Just listen to me, will you? Ain’t none of your guns gonna be good enough against a man like him.”


	15. putting out traps

Dark comes down slowly over the bayou, but it comes thick and velvety, always with distant music stitched into its seams. Edward and Sophia follow the backroads with the windows rolled down, breathing in the stifling night and listening as a chorus of cicadas gradually becomes the lazy drawl of a jazz trumpet and piano keys.

“You really think George Hodgson is mixed up in all this?” Sophia asks. “I can’t really picture him as a snake handler.”

“You know George, he gets easily swept along.” 

Although Edward has to admit he doesn’t really know George, not anymore. He lived with his aunt and uncle, who were old money and nice enough, but always a little bit on the outside, living so far downriver that the Littles rarely had occasion to call on them. 

“Take a right here.”

They turn off onto a dirt track and suddenly there is the house, an old sugar cane manor looming out of the trees. The light spilling out of the ground-floor windows makes the long grass below look an unhealthy shade of yellow, and inside someone is bashing out a dirge-like rendition of _St James Infirmary_ on a piano that was probably used to hide liquor during Prohibition and hasn’t been tuned since.

Sophia shakes her head. “Doesn’t this make you think of a horror movie? One of those scenes where you can tell that they’re about to do something really stupid, and it makes you want to yell at the screen?”

“Who am I in this, the stupid one?”

“Look, Eddie, I appreciate you want to help me and Silna get those snakes back, but maybe you should have just asked Tozer about it, like I said.”

“Well, we’re here now,” Edward says weakly, because he can’t bring himself to tell her that he already tried talking to Sol, and that Sol is the real reason he’s here at all. _Something is rotten in the state of Louisiana_ , he thinks, and somehow the boy he used to shoot beer bottles with and steal nicotine kisses from is mixed up in it.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


George Hodgson has always looked a little like a child drew him with their eyes closed, with his limbs too long and his wispy hair that doesn’t seem beholden to the laws of physics. He jumps up from the piano the moment Edward and Sophia are shown into the room, and insists on kissing them both on the cheek, before ushering them through into a dim parlour stuffed with house plants and lit only by candles.

“You’ll excuse me,” he says, accent thick with bayou-français. “Electricity tends to come and go as it pleases out here. Gibson, will you bring us a bottle of the ‘82?”

Edward vaguely remembers one of the Hartnells comparing Billy Gibson to an albino alligator. He figures he can see it, the way the man stands there stock still in the shadows, pale as fresh bones, and hardly seems to blink as he watches them.

“Anything else?” he asks, like he’s used to receiving orders from George. The Hodgsons haven’t had the money to keep a servant in decades, let alone the number of servants required for the upkeep of such a large house, but judging from the way George is ordering Gibson around, it would seem that habits die hard.

“Ah, no, thank you, Gibson. Actually, you’d better go out back and see to the— well, I leave all that to you.”

“What’s he got out back?” Sophia asks, once Gibson has slunk away into the recesses of the house.

“Hm? Oh, nothing.” George blinks at them in the thin light. “We’ve had some trouble with coyotes lately... That’s why Gibson’s come by. He’s putting out traps for me.”

The fronds of some trailing plant are brushing against the back of Edward’s neck and he can’t get comfortable. 

“Listen, George.” The sooner they get what they came for, the sooner they’ll be able to leave. “Are you familiar with a Cornelius Hickey?”

George shifts in his seat. “I’ve heard of him, sure.”

“George, don’t be obtuse,” Sophia frowns. “We know he spends a lot of time at your house, we know he’s got that revival church out in the woods, and we know he stole three snakes from my friend’s nature reserve. Do you know anything about this?”

“Snakes?” George glances briefly towards the door that Gibson disappeared through. “Don’t know anything about any snakes. And as for this Hickey fella, there’s all sorts of folks come around _La Mélodie_ , I can’t be expected to remember every single one of them.”

“So if we were to go out back we wouldn’t find Billy Gibson with a bunch of rattlesnakes?” Edward says.

George straightens up, his pale mouth in a flat line.

“I don’t like what you’re implying, sir. No I do not. In fact, I think it’d be better if you two were to leave.”

He mumbles something about manners as he shows them out, and says hurriedly, “Give my best to your aunt, Sophia,” before closing the door on them, thrusting them back into the night.

Sophia mutters, “Get your piano tuned, asshole,” and Edward has to bite back a laugh. George’s rude dismissal seems to have got under her skin, and now it’s her who grabs Edward’s arm, tugging him away from the porch light. “Come on, I bet he’s got those snakes round the back.”

Edward can hardly dig in his heels when it was his idea to come out here in the first place. But talking to George was one thing, sneaking around his property is another, and Edward can’t help hearing all of Hartnell’s warnings again. It’s a strange kind of folk get caught up in snake churches, and he isn’t sure he wants to run into any of them out here in the dark.

Sophia is already creeping ahead, however, so he follows her with some reluctance, their path lit only by the eerie candlelight from within. From behind the house comes the distant sound of raised voices. They step through the long twisted shadows cast from the kitchen window, and that’s when Edward sees them, all lined up in a neat little row on the table. Those same dead birds he’s been finding on his doorstep every day since he came home.

Sophia is already a few steps ahead and Edward is about to join her when the sound of a gunshot shatters the air around them. They both go utterly still, Edward’s eyes on Sophia’s straight-backed silhouette, and he wonders at her composure, at the sort of life she might have led that she’d treat a gunshot with caution but no panic whatsoever. At a motion of her hand, he comes to join her around the corner of the house.

Someone has lit a fire in the backyard, piling up crates and other bits of refuse as if this were a scrapyard and not the back garden of a mansion. In the distance the sky is a paler shade of petrol blue over the black water. In a fit of erratic laughter, a big guy takes another shot at the grass with a large revolver, aiming for a snake or a rat, unless he’s trying to shoot the ground itself.

“You can’t shoot for shit, Manson,” someone else calls, from the depths of a deck chair.

There’s at least five or six men back there, lit in orange slides by the shifting flames.

“Drunk,” Sophia whispers, wrinkling her nose. 

Edward has never cared about her as much as he does now, seeing her ready to charge a group of beer-soaked, gun-toting snake-church madmen in the shadow of a crumbling mansion. It’s what has him say, “Come on. Let’s go.” In case she hasn’t understood him, he wraps a hand around her elbow, gently pulling her away from the gathering.

“We’ve seen all we need to.”

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


“Sol wasn’t there,” Edward says, later, when they’re back in the car and it’s only the two of them and the strip of road cut out by the headlights, the radio turned down low, broadcasting a song reduced to the rise and fall of its melody. The smell of the trees and the river drifts in through the window, murky as ever. The day he’d come back from Chicago, that smell had hit him in the face like a solid slap.

“We didn’t see him,” Sophia says, her voice deceptively kind. “It doesn’t mean he’s not involved.”

“Did you see them?”

“Who, the men? Yes, most of them. Hickey was the one on the porch.”

That’s not what Edward meant, but he doesn’t insist. Sophia was so intent on finding out what happened out back of the house that it’s possible she didn’t see the birds in the kitchen, or saw them too fleetingly to make any sort of connection.

“Any kind of law we could bring down upon them?” he asks.

Sophia pulls a face. “Silna did report the theft. Not that I expect we’ll hear from this deputy anytime soon. Looked all of twenty years old, that boy did.”

Edward drops her off at the Franklins’ and refuses her offer of a nightcap, pretexting a headache, a pressing need to lie down and rest. It’s one of those nights when he can tell his thoughts aren’t quite his own, overrun by white noise that could be whispers, could be the breathing of the trees as the wind rushes through the branches of the cypresses.

When he gets home, he’s only half-surprised to find Sol waiting on the porch. 

The question is there in Sol’s face before he even opens his mouth, and Edward says, “I was just having trouble sleeping. Went for a drive.”

“You smell like a bonfire.”

“Yeah, they’re burning dead horses out by the Evans’ farm.”

“God dammit, Edward, I know where you’ve been. You got that red dirt all on your shoes. I told you not to go out there, goddamn.” Sol slaps the flat of his hand on his thigh. He’s wearing the same pair of jeans he’s owned since he was eighteen – Edward recognises the tear in the left knee from when they jumped a fence running from Crozier’s dog. _You never know you’ve been living the good times until they’re over_ , he thinks. He doesn’t want to be mad at Sol now.

“Do you want to come in?” he asks, gesturing wearily to the door. 

“Edward, haven’t you been listening to me? You’re getting yourself tangled up in something I can’t untangle you from.”

“I know, I know.”

He should tell Sol about the dead birds, maybe he doesn’t know. Or maybe he does and that’s why he’s been here night after night. Still trying to protect Edward from the danger he drags around with him like tin cans on a truck bumper.

Still, Edward says, “Come inside. Come up to bed.”

“Edward, I’m still pissed at you.” But Sol follows him through the door and he catches him as Edward stumbles, pulling him to his chest. Lord in heaven, he is tired right down to his bones.

“I know, I know,” he murmurs, his hands in Sol’s beard, mouth finding his mouth. “Tomorrow.”

“Did he see you?” Sol tries to ask, but Edward is resolved to let this conversation die - and if Sol won’t let it, he’ll find ways to convince him.

The thick rug exhales a faint cloud of dust as he gets down on his knees and he hopes his shoes will rub off on it, that it’ll keep all that red dust from the drive in front of George’s house. It’s been a while since he went down on anyone but Sol doesn’t let on, head thrown back against the wall and with his hand curled into a fist on the sideboard - it used to be that Sol would pull at Edward’s hair, but now he seems reluctant to do so, as if he isn’t quite sure what’s allowed and what isn’t.

As a child Edward used to let his fingers trail along that sideboard each time he came into the house, to ground himself maybe, maybe to let the house know that he’d come home, and it seems fitting that the scarred, varnished wood should now bear the weight of Sol’s hand. There’s a fresh desperation to Edward’s every gesture and Sol makes a sound of protest when Edward’s teeth graze his skin, when Edward’s fingers dig into his hips. Edward lets himself be pulled up and they finish each other off in a thoughtless tussle against the sideboard, Edward holding on one-armed to Sol’s shoulders, his other hand trapped between them, thinking there’s nowhere else he’d rather be. 

Every time he closes his eyes, he can see the reddish glare of the flames at _La Mélodie,_ flickering against his eyelids.


	16. rum and chatter

Dundy only stayed the one night before returning to New Orleans, and without his general audacity, James had a hard time putting together a guest list. He was used to being the centre of parties back in New York or Rio, but nobody knew him here. What if no one came? What if it was just him standing by himself in the echoing house, with tray tables of appetisers and a lonely punch bowl? The whole thing had pushed him into an odd mood. He’d felt as if he was moving underwater – a panicky, dismal feeling, familiar from the time he’d leapt into the Hudson to save a drowning man and pulled him out dead, a long time ago now. In the end, he’d called Jane Franklin, who took charge of the guest list with almost manic energy.

Now his house is full of strangers, eating his pão de queijo and drinking his rum punch, getting their fingerprints on the glassware he bought last minute from the antiques store. _At least they came_ , he tells himself. Some have even brought their own contributions – a shoofly pie from the Hornbys, a Country Ham from the Hodgson boy, honey and biscuits from Pastor John. The strapping Graham Gore has brought his entire family, although his children did colour in their own bunting, which is sweet, James supposes, if you like children. All come and place their offerings on the tables in the front yard as if this is some sort of ritual, and them all dressed in their Sunday Best too. John Franklin has wandered off in conversation with old Charles Des Voeux Senior, but Jane remains at James’ side, introducing each guest to him as they arrive. The neighbours, in turn, smile politely and say _You’re very welcome, James_ , as if to remind him that, ultimately, he is the guest in their town.

“How’re you settling in?” Graham’s wife Ava asks, smiling wearily as she hoists her youngest up on her hip.

“Oh fine, just fine. The location’s just stunning, isn’t it? Gorgeous countryside.”

Sheriff Bryant ladles himself a glass of punch. “Oh sure. The chemical plants look especially good this time of year.”

The man appears slightly out of his depth without his uniform, though, so James gives him a nod and says, “Must be nice working here. Can’t imagine you get much trouble in a small parish like this.”

Jane Franklin pats James lightly on the arm, like a parent trying to pretend her child hasn’t just said something embarrassing.

Bryant raises his eyebrows. “I’m guessing you’ve never lived in a small town before.”

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


In search of a familiar face, James finds Francis on the veranda, trying to suck the life out of a cigarette. “Don’t you know those things’ll kill you?” he says jovially.

“Oh, I’ve never heard that. I don’t think I’ve ever heard that before.”

“Are you having a good time?”

Francis gestures with his cigarette to the plot where James has been trying to plant tomatoes. “I’d have put them round back. Drainage is no good here.”

“Right, well.” James flips his hair out of his eyes. “Maybe you can come over and show me sometime.”

“This is good land, James. It doesn’t deserve to go to waste.”

“I don’t want it to.” It comes out sounding like a question, and then, as if he feels the need to answer it himself, “Look, you obviously have a clear sense of what needs to be done here, I’m… I’m deferring to your expertise, Francis. Come and teach me. You’re always welcome here, you do know that, don’t you?”

“Ah, save it. The Franklins can’t hear you.”

“You think that’s why I talk to you? To impress the Franklins?”

James stares at him, but it’s at that moment that Sophia Cracroft arrives, looking like midday sunlight with her golden hair curling softly around her face, brandishing a bottle of wine with a ribbon tied around the neck. Francis gives James a curt nod and heads in her direction. James sees her put her hand on Francis’ arm as she leans in to kiss his cheek, and it feels like watching someone dive from a boat and swim easily to the surface. A reminder how some people can do things others cannot.

The Hartnell boys strike up a rendition of _Little Sadie_ with banjo and guitar _,_ and Thomas Blanky joins them on his three-stringed fiddle. Graham Gore’s children start twirling with one another, and soon enough plenty of the adults have set down their glasses and paper plates to join in the dance. The lawn is well shaded by the trees, but the sun dazzling through the gaps in the foliage casts dappled shadows over bare arms and legs, and with the music and laughter and molasses in the air, it feels like you could bottle the moment and sell it as pure summertime. James watches from the veranda and some of his anxiety begins to lift. He thinks, _Folks never just get up and dance like this in New York_. He reckons he could be happy in a place where people dance.

Sophia is being deftly spun by that blue-eyed boy Jopson, while Francis lingers by the table in conversation with Edward Little, who looks as though he’s come dressed for a funeral rather than a garden party. James finds himself thinking _Good_ , and what he means is that he is glad Miss Cracroft is dancing with somebody other than his dour-faced neighbour.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


“Mr Hartnell,” says James, “not to put too fine a point on things, but you’re my saviour.”

Tom Hartnell puts his banjo down to swat at a little cloud of midges on the wide porch steps. His brother is across the lawn strumming his guitar at one of the dark-haired Darlington girls, and Mr Blanky has limped away to chat to Francis.

Hartnell smiles, glancing along the veranda to where Pastor John has been cornered by Jane Franklin and several other members of the Women’s Church Committee.

“Don’t let him hear you say that. Only one kind of saviour in his book.”

“Well, I mean it. You and your brother are holding this party together. I’ve never seen anyone play like that.”

James offers him a glass of punch, which Hartnell drinks so fast he spills at least half of it in the grass.

“Witch.”

“Excuse me?”

“That’s how we learnt, me and my brother.” Hartnell wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “Used to be a witch living in the houseboat ‘cross from my daddy’s. She taught us how to play banjo.”

James just blinks at him until the boy cracks a smile and shakes his head.

“Nah, I’m just yanking your chain. We had lessons.”

“Ah. Well, you’re both really something.”

“My daddy really wanted us to learn. He figured he had five kids, he’d turn us into some kind of little band.”

“Oh, I love that. Like the Von Trapps.”

“Well I don’t know any Von Trapps, but sure. Except Mary ain’t got no ear for music and Betsy can hardly even play tambourine, so it didn’t work out.”

“That’s too bad. But I hope you and your father still get to play from time to time? You really are very good.”

Hartnell gives him an odd sideways look, and James can’t help feeling like he’s said something he wasn’t supposed to.

“Nah,” Hartnell says eventually. “Not so much these days… Oh hell, what is he _doing_?”

“…and I’m telling you I know what we saw, dammit.”

James follows Hartnell’s gaze to see Edward Little staring down George Hodgson, the two of them standing in the neglected flowerbed below the veranda. Their shadows are stretched long and severe in the late afternoon sun. Sophia detaches herself discreetly from a cluster of her aunt’s friends and goes to stand beside Edward.

“What’s going on, Eddie?” She glances over her shoulder, but for now no one else seems to have noticed, too awash in rum and chatter.

Their voices are low but close enough for James to make out.

“Edward –” Hodgson leans away from him. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”

“For Christ sakes, George,” Sophia hisses. “Stop it. I mean it, we’ve had enough of this ‘you don’t know what you’re getting into’ crap.”

“You left those birds on _my_ doorstep,” says Edward. “You dragged me into this in the first place, although God only knows why. What have I ever done to you?”

“It’s not like that. Please, you don’t understand –”

Sophia holds up a hand. “Where are the snakes, George? We know you’ve got them, we’ve seen your little hillbilly cult in the backyard, so just do yourself a favour and return what doesn’t belong to you before we have to get the police involved.”

Hodgson wrings his hands together. “It’s not _up_ to me.”

“Who is it up to?” Edward snaps. “Hickey?”

At that, James hears something shatter behind him, which feels fitting, he thinks, now that his party seems to be falling apart. He turns to see one of his antique glasses in a broken pile at the feet of John Irving. The women of the Church Committee are fussing over it, but the pastor just stares down at the trio bickering in the weeds, a strange, grim expression settling over his face.

“Excuse me,” says Hartnell, and James watches as he moves silently down the steps and goes to place a hand on Edward’s arm.

“Enough.”

“Stay out of this, Tom. It’s not your problem.”

“Yeah well, you’re making it my problem.”

Sophia, looking over her shoulder again, catches James’ eye, and leans in to whisper something to Edward, who straightens up at once and flashes James a stiff smile.

James feels as if they are all sitting in a rowboat above him while he sinks into the murky water below. He hates how petulant it sounds in his head, but this is _his_ party, this was supposed to be his day, and they’ve got no right to smash his glasses and trample his flowerbed. He suddenly wishes Francis was here next to him, if only because he would know what the hell was going on. It’s not the argument that bothers him, he realises, it’s the fact that he hasn’t been included.

This would never have happened in New York.

But there is someone standing beside him now – he hadn’t noticed. A short, dark-haired man with a sly kind of angle about him. James searches back through the cart-load of names Jane Franklin dumped on him this afternoon, trying to find the one that fits.

“Charles, isn’t it?” he says carefully. “Des Voeux?”

The young man is standing right in the way of the sun, so James has to squint to look at him.

“Charles is my father, everyone calls me Charlie.”

“Well.” James rubs his eyes. “You want a drink, Charlie? I could do with a drink.”

“Sure. Hey, you know, you shouldn’t let it bother you, that stuff Edward Little was saying just now.”

“Oh? How’s that?”

“Haven’t you heard? They’re all crazy, the Littles. I wouldn’t listen to a word comes out of his mouth.”

Across the lawn, Edward is knocking back a glass of punch. Neither he nor Sophia is looking at James, but the Hodgson boy is. Just staring wide-eyed at him and Charlie Des Voeux, who grins now and says,

“Great party, by the way.”


	17. tinderbox

The following day is hot enough that the trees would bribe the dogs to piss on them, and the Hartnell siblings hole up in the diner to escape the busted AC on their mother’s houseboat. A couple of out-of-towners – retirees on a road trip, judging by the husband’s bucket hat – give them a wide berth as the five of them tear into a greasy lunch. Tom doesn’t pay the old couple any mind, watching his brothers and sisters with a fierce warmth as they wipe their mouths with their hands and scuff their holey sneakers on the linoleum.

“Hey Charlie.”

Chambers hovers at the end of their table, chewing his pen thoughtfully. He and Tom’s younger brother went to school together, and when Charlie’s not selling peaches with his sisters out by the highway, he and George Chambers like to climb up into the trees and drink cheap beer. 

“You and your kin know anything about getting someone to fall in love with you?”

“Sure. You wanna bury a frog in a box in a ditch, and then when it’s all dried up you take one of the bones, give it to whoever it is you’re sweet on.”

“Charlie, what the hell are you talking about?” says Tom, around a mouthful of fried chicken. “You just gotta sleep with some of their hair under your pillow.”

Betsy snorts. “No dummy, you’ve gotta feed them some of _your_ hair.”

Mary shakes her head. “Y’all are so nasty.”

“Yeah I ain’t going round touching no dead frogs,” says Chambers. “Betsy’s way sounds easier, I guess.”

Johnny grimaces at his basket of chicken. “Yeah well, you just let us know if you’re planning on serving hair in your food anytime soon.”

“Gee, Johnny.” Chambers scrawls little hearts on their check. “How’d you know it’s not you I’m in love with?”

The door goes and Blanky limps in, leaning on his bone-handle cane, followed by Crozier fanning himself with a dusty leather Stetson that looks like it’s seen better days. Crozier takes a seat in the booth by the door, while Blanky sidles up to the counter and asks Sam Honey,

“You got any beer that ain’t rootbeer?”

Tom figures now is as good a time as any. He nudges Johnny’s arm. “Hey, I gotta do a thing. Keep this lot busy for a few more minutes, will you?”

Johnny nods. “Hey,” he says, leaning in towards their younger siblings. “Y’all wanna get a pool going on how long it takes Chambers to get fired for making somebody eat his hair?”

Tom makes his way to Crozier’s table. “Hey, sir? Can I talk to you?”

Crozier raps the formica tabletop with his knuckles, the same way he used to whenever Tom would approach him up at the farm, just wanting someone to sit with after his father left. He slides into the booth now, fiddling with the little cross on a chain around his neck.

“What’s on your mind, son?”

“Yesterday…” The words aren’t coming like he’d hoped and it makes him chew his fingernails.

“This got something to do with Fitzjames’ party? He had a real sulk afterwards, that’s for sure. I saw you talking to Edward Little – this all got something to do with him?”

Tom frowns. “It ain’t that, sir. It’s just… I know things I ain’t supposed to know.”

“Well now, how do you mean?”

“Like…” Tom wrinkles his nose. “You ever hear about that place out in the woods?”

“Can’t say that I have.”

“It ain’t right, what they do out there. What they do with them snakes, I mean. Like they got no regard for human life. For nothing at all. And I ain’t really one for preaching, but the stuff they come out with? It’s like you wouldn’t even think the words could go together til they say them.”

“Have you mentioned any of this to Pastor John? Preaching and all, seems like he might have a take on it.”

“He already knows. But he ain’t gonna do nothing about it because… Because he don’t want no one to know he was there, that’s why. But now it’s all getting stirred up again, what with Edward asking questions.”

He is careful not to mention Sophia Cracroft.

“It just feels like a matchstick and a tinderbox. And Pastor John, I’m worried he’s gonna get hurt again.”

Crozier looks at him curiously. “What do you mean, hurt again?”

“It ain’t… That ain’t important. Look, sir, I was hoping you could help me, talk to the police for me. Can’t be me who does it, pastor can’t know I told anybody this. But you gotta tell the sheriff or someone, they gotta know what’s going on out there.”

“Tom, slow down. You still haven’t told me what _is_ going on out there.”

Tom leans forward, lowering his voice. “Snake handling, sir. It’s a snake handling church, but like none you ever heard about. It’s like he _wants_ them to get bit.”

“Who?”

Tom sighs. In the booth behind him, his brothers and sisters are still chatting away, oblivious. Blanky is at the counter talking to Honey, and Chambers is handing out napkins to an elderly couple in the corner. None of the men he’d once seen in the woods are here, but he can’t help feeling like there are eyes on him nonetheless.

Crozier spreads his hands out on the table. “You don’t have to answer if it puts you in a corner.”

But they’ll need the name, Tom thinks. There’s no point in him saying any of this if they don’t know who to arrest.

He fingers the cross hanging from his neck. “ _One day your nets will catch on my body at the bottom of the swamp,”_ John had said the other night as they lay in bed.

 _“I’ll haul you up, then,”_ Tom replied. “ _Take you home all dripping, fix you a drink. Take myself back out with an offering of good whiskey, braided twigs and fine bleached bones, to thank the river for giving you back to me_.”

John smiled wearily. “ _I never met a man with no faith who could be as optimistic as you.”_

 _“I never said I ain't got no faith_.” He reached out and ran his fingers over John's beard. “ _I_ _just choose to place it elsewhere, is all_.”

He took the cross, not because of what it stood for but because it was John’s, thinking maybe if he carried a piece of John with him, he could somehow keep him safe.

“His name is Hickey,” he says quietly now. “You tell that to Sheriff Bryant, but you can’t tell no one I told you.”

“He frightens you, this man Hickey. He hasn’t hurt you, has he?”

Tom shakes his head. “You just ever meet someone and you can tell right from the start that they ain’t right? Like…something missing. And John – Pastor John, I mean –”

He freezes but Crozier only nods slowly.

“I’ll have a word with the sheriff. Can’t say as I know much about the laws on snake handling, but it seems like in the very least it’s something he should be aware of. You did the right thing here, son.”

Tom grips the cross in his hand hard enough that he knows when he lets go, the shape will be imprinted deep on his skin.


	18. with regards to the possession of serpents

Bryant has arrested people in those woods before. 

Several years ago, Sheriff Franklin had sent him to investigate an old woman’s report of a disturbance downriver. It’d been two, three weeks at most after he’d joined the office. Bryant doesn’t spook easy, but from the start there’d been something off about that night. Charred circles on the forest floor and the moon hanging by a thread above the trees and at irregular intervals a long, wordless scream had echoed through the forest; it never seemed to come from the same place. With his torchlight pointed at a trail of footsteps in the undergrowth, Bryant had felt adrift and exposed. When he’d eventually found the source of the disturbance, just a bunch of kids playing at scaring each other by the old sawmill, he’d rounded them up and taken them in to teach them a lesson about frightening old ladies. None of them had ever admitted to burning those wide circles in the clearing. The next day, Bryant had wanted to check in on the old woman who’d signalled the disturbance, but as it turned out she’d given an inaudible name and the address of an abandoned house. That was the way it used to be with Sheriff Franklin: half-baked cases, left partly unsolved.

The woods aren’t a bad place, but they’re remote and no one’s tried pruning them in maybe a decade. It’s just rows upon rows of stunted trees overrun with the tangle of bushes, the ground littered with refuse, cans of soda and cigarette butts tossed out the windows of passing cars, the remains of late-night campfires with shredded plastic bags and beer cans and the occasional mouldy mattress. Franklin had bragged at one point that he’d clean up the public side of the Belle Vue forest of its filth, literal and otherwise, but like many of the old man’s campaign promises it never came to pass and there’s little about the woods that’s beautiful, little about them that offers much of a view, unless you climb on top of a tree maybe, and then you’ll see past the woods and the fields all the way to the river, maybe all the way to the chemical plants.

If he wants a view of the plants, Bryant can just drive over to the diner. 

“Let’s stop here,” he decides, as he parks the car off the side of the road, in the shelter of a few pines. They waited until sundown to set off and now the sky is a polluted dark blue. When Bryant switches off the headlights, the trees and the nearby road and the field of sugarcane on the other side of it all vanish into the night.

“We’re walking?” Braine asks, like that’s the last thing he wants to do and maybe he’s forgotten he’s got legs attached to his body. 

Bryant had been tempted to wait until someone else showed up at the station so he wouldn’t have to take the rookie, but Daly was god knows where and Hedges and Patterson had been called in to break up a fight at a bar near the Interstate. Braine will have to do.

“They know these woods better than we do,” Bryant explains with what patience he can muster. “If we drive into that clearing they’ll scatter like buckshot. Come on.”

Caution ain’t the only reason he chose a quiet approach. Bryant’s always been a diligent member of the town’s Baptist congregation - a faithful Christian even if he’d hesitate to call himself a good one, he’s had no shortage of impure thoughts and he’s done his fair share of wrong in his time, but the beliefs his grandma instilled into him are still shoring him up, and the idea that people from his own town, people he’s known his whole life, could flock to some false prophet in the woods... It doesn’t sit right by him.

They find the track that used to lead to the old sawmill, a gap through the trees like a gash. The woods aren’t that big, and Bryant made sure to park close enough to the abandoned mill that they might easily get back to the car should they run into trouble. Though there doesn’t appear to be any light up ahead, they can hear a murmur in the distance. The sound of voices, raised together in prayer. Bryant and Braine keep their torches pointed towards the ground.

“Where are we?” Braine asks in a loud whisper. He sounds far younger than his twenty-six years.

“Belle Vue forest. Part of it is George Hodgson’s - he came to the office a few months ago, I think it was before you started working with us. Complained that someone was poisoning the fish in his pond when really they’d just been dying from the heat. Some exotic species, the kind you need a permit for. Hodgson played dumb when I told him that. Rest of the forest also used to belong to the Hodgsons, but they sold it to some sawmill before I was born. Then the sawmill went away. The land’s public now.” 

“Is this about fish?” The car can’t be six hundred feet behind them and Braine already sounds out of breath.

“Snakes,” Bryant says. “Though come to think of it, it wouldn’t be much of a stretch for Hodgson to have gone from trafficking fish to trafficking snakes.”

When they reach the clearing of the old sawmill, they find several trucks parked in the main courtyard. The voices are coming from the main building and growing louder by the second. The earlier rhythm of a hymn or prayer has been replaced by a disquieting sort of discordance, like a crowd cheering at a race or street fight. Bryant glimpses a flicker of light through the open door.

“Turn off your torch.”

The machinery and logs are long gone. Inside the building it’s only dust and weeds; last time Bryant was here the floor had fallen in in places. The roof too. It’s hard to tell at night but he thinks they might have fixed up the place, brought in a few benches. The mill is big enough, and dark enough, that they’re able to slip inside unnoticed. The people on the benches are facing the other end of the room, where two men stand in front of a table lit up by a couple of storm lanterns. The cheering ( _Manson! Manson!_ ) is directed towards a big guy in a ratty t-shirt and jeans who’s chugging the contents of a Mason jar. Moonshine, Bryant assumes. He’d have recognised Manson even without the crowd’s chanting, by his bulk and his waxy face, though Manson looks far more awake than usual, his calf-like placidity having given place to frantic animation. When he hands back the jar to the much shorter man next to him, there’s a big smile on his face. Bryant returns his gaze to the benches. There’s got to be about a dozen people here, not counting the two in front. Although they’re all wrapped in shadows and you couldn’t quite say where one person ends and the next begins, his breath catches in his throat when one of the men in the front row turns around slightly and he realises it’s his own deputy, James Daly with his big chin and his arms crossed over his broad chest, still wearing his short-sleeved uniform.

“And nothing by any means shall hurt you!” the man next to Manson shouts, as the crowd’s disorderly screaming subsides into murmurs of assent. “Magnus drank the deadly drink, and yet! Here he stands among you.” 

Manson regains his seat on the front bench, Daly slapping his back with a grin before they take their seats. 

“I’m going to tell you a story,” the man says.

A ripple of anticipation goes through the crowd and as people turn to one another Bryant thinks he glimpses other familiar silhouettes - that lanky kid from the gas station, the bald head and sturdy shoulders of a guy he’d arrested once for drunk and disorderly conduct, and George Hodgson’s fluttering hair. Young men, all of them. The man in front he’s never seen before, though it must be the preacher Hickey that Crozier has told him about. Everything about him is slender, even his long face, his long nose, his red wisp of a goatee. His voice doesn’t carry much authority but you can tell he likes to hear himself speak, likes to play with people’s attention.

“Some will say that I don’t always tell the truth, and they’d be right. But them words I want to share with you come straight from the book of God, and as such I don’t think anyone can accuse me of fabricating falsehoods. Now, Paul was on a ship that ran aground on the island of Melita. And the barbarous people on the island, they took pity on Paul and his companions. They kindled a fire for them, and took them in, because of the rain, and because it was cold.” 

When Hickey rubs his arms for emphasis, the whole gathering does the same, and Bryant catches Braine with his hands half-lifted, although he quickly returns them to his sides and looks down, embarrassed, at his feet.

“Paul had gathered a bundle of sticks, and he laid them on the fire,” Hickey goes on, lowering his hand beneath the table as if he were putting the sticks down. “And then there came a viper out of the heat, and it fastened...” - he jerks back up - “on his hand.”

Bryant recoils on instinct, his back hitting the wall, as the snake coils around Hickey’s hands. Brown and black. He’s seen cottonmouths before. He’s certainly never been stupid enough to seize one in both hands. 

Hickey continues his tale, his voice climbing in pitch as he rises on the tip of his toes, his arms shaking, his hands swinging like maybe it ain’t a snake that he’s holding but a streamer at a party. 

“And when the barbarians saw the venomous beast hang on his hand, they said among themselves, No doubt this man is a murderer, whom, though he hath escaped the sea, yet vengeance suffereth not to live! And he shook off the beast into the fire…” and saying so, he drops the snake back to wherever it came from, and Bryant thinks or hopes that he hears the sound of a lid falling shut. “...and he felt no harm. And although they looked when he should have swollen, or fallen down dead suddenly... They looked a great while, but they saw no harm come to him.” Hickey looks up, his pale face transfixed, his arms raised. “And so they changed their minds, and said... That he was a god.”

The crowd erupts into applause. As far as Bryant is concerned, the sudden wild clapping is far less worrisome than the fact that at least three people have gone down on their knees, and someone on the far left corner had started, not to cry, but to wail.

“Who will be next? Which one of you will follow the signs?”

“I will!” Someone calls out, and Bryant watches slack-jawed as Billy Gibson comes away from his bench, his shoulders curved inwards as in a bow, his hands gently extended. Hickey kneels behind the table again, and this time, when he rises, he isn’t holding the cottonmouth but some other striped brown snake. Maybe the snake was asleep, but the moment Hickey lifts it above the table, its tail begins to rattle.

“What the fuck,” Braine says, without bothering to whisper this time, though there’s enough enthusiastic chanting and foot-stomping that his incredulity goes unheard.

“Go get the car,” Bryant tells him. “We’re arresting that lunatic.” 

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


When they walk into the office, everyone has gone home but for Hedges, who’s taken a seat at the receptionist’s desk in the girl’s absence. Bryant puts the box down in front of her and stops her hand when she makes to lift the lid.

“Don’t. Get us someone from Wildlife and Fisheries. Or what’s his name, the veterinarian.”

“Goodsir,” Hedges supplies, her dark eyes going from the box to Bryant’s scowl to Hickey’s nonplussed expression.

“Those handcuffs are too tight, sheriff,” Hickey calls out. “I don’t know if I should take it as a sign that you’re suspicious or if it means that you like me a bit too much.”

“You need to stop seeing signs everywhere,” Bryant tells him gruffly, as he pulls a depleted pack of cigarettes from his chest pocket. “Braine, take him to the interrogation room. I’ll be there in a minute. If…” He shakes his head. “ _When_ he talks to you, don’t answer.”

“What was this about?” Hedges asks, as Braine and Hickey disappear around the corner.

If Bryant were a more expansive person, he’d be telling her how relieved he’d been to see her at that desk when they walked in. When they’d started working together, her composure made him uneasy, like she knew better than he did and was just waiting for him to make a mistake. In time however, he’d come to prefer having her as a partner rather than Daly, who’s dependable enough but nowhere near as sharp, or Patterson, who’s going soft in his old age, or Braine, who should have been allowed to age some more before someone put a gun in his hands.

In Franklin’s time, deputies could be young or old but more often than not they were white and they certainly weren’t women. It’d taken Bryant about a week to realise Hedges was better at this job than Franklin had ever been; about a year to come to terms with the fact that she’s better at it than he is, and he’d been a dick about it at first, but as he told Georgie Chambers two nights ago, after he picked him up completely sloshed on the side of the road leading back from the Shack, _Sometimes, you gotta grow up_.

“Crozier came by this afternoon with a tip about a snake-handling church in the woods,” he tells Hedges. “Braine and I went to have a look.”

“Does this have anything to do with the snakes that got stolen from the animal sanctuary?”

Bryant gives her a puzzled look.

“What snakes? When?”

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


They leave the box with the snakes on a table in the meeting-room, and Braine behind the front desk to wait for the veterinarian. A cursory search reveals that they’ve arrested one or two Hickeys over the years, though none matching the current Hickey’s description.

“Hickeys, you live downriver, don’t you?” Hedges asks, flipping through what information they could find at short notice. One Hickey had omitted to pay a couple speeding tickets. Another had shot someone in what had later been declared a hunting accident. “We’re gonna need an address.”

“Oh, I’m not one of those Hickeys,” Hickey says, in that same tone of barely contained malice that has kept Bryant on edge all the way back from the forest. “I’m one of the Appalachian Hickeys.”

Hedges raises her eyebrows at him. 

“Can you be a bit more specific?”

Hickey gives it some thought.

“Virginia. West Virginia. At present though, you may find me in the care of Mr George Hodgson, at _La Mélodie_. Might I ask how long you intend to hold me?”

Bryant takes a sip of his foul, reheated coffee.

“I don’t suppose you can show us a permit for those snakes?” When Hickey doesn’t answer, he forges on, “Unless of course the little spectacle we witnessed earlier wasn’t some weird cult but a legally sanctioned display by a wildlife research centre… Or a zoo… Or a scientific organisation… You know, any such organisation as could have obtained the requisite permit from the Department of Wildlife and Fisheries in accordance with the Animal Welfare Act…” He glances down at his notes, “... US Code Title 9, Chapter 54, section 2132...” 

“I must admit I’m not exactly clear on what the law says in these parts, with regards to the possession of serpents,” Hickey admits, “but for a first-time offender, I must be looking at… a 200$ fine? For that would be the charges, surely. The possession of venomous serpents. You wouldn’t impinge on my First Amendment rights, would you? As far as I know, freedom of religion is still sacred in this country.”

Bryant pinches the bridge of his nose. He can’t have been in Hickey’s company for more than an hour, but it sure feels like he’s heard enough bullshit to last him a lifetime.

“Can’t say I know much about snakes, but it can’t be good for them, you shakin’ them around like that.” 

Hickey’s smile is swift. “Is this what you go around doing now, sheriff? Protecting the rights of serpents?”

“Snakes aside, I can’t see this kind of exercise being risk-free for your congregation,” Hedges says, in a far more reasonable tone.

“I think you’ll find that the people in my congregation aren’t thrill-seekers. The only thing they seek is the truth. The word of God. Taking up a serpent is an honour.” Hickey’s blue eyes are very bright under the pallid neon. “It’s an extraordinary thing, to feel the power of God move through you, to be secure in the knowledge that it is God who desires you to take up the serpent. In my years as a preacher I’ve seen many wonders, deputy - I’ve seen people cured of illnesses that would have left doctors scratching their heads, I’ve seen the devil escape through a woman’s mouth as she came back to her own self. I’ve seen all the things a god can do to help his people, and it wasn’t out of some cruel desire to put them to the test. You don’t go take up a serpent to prove something, to find your faith. You do it because you _have_ faith. Because you know that God is in the room. We have chosen to live close to God. There ain’t nothing wrong with that.”

“And if you get bit?” Hedges asks, after a look at Bryant’s sombre face has ascertained that he doesn’t want to pick up his side of the conversation.

Hickey shrugs.

“Then it’s my time to go. I’ve made my peace with that. But I can feel in my heart it won’t happen soon. Not until many years from now.”

Hedges searches her papers.

“We got a report six days ago. Someone trespassed into an animal sanctuary and stole three snakes, including a cottonmouth and a rattlesnake. Does that ring a bell?”

She pushes a grainy black and white picture towards Hickey, a shot from some surveillance camera footage where one can faintly discern someone climbing over a wall with what must be a snake-filled sports bag. Hickey pulls the picture closer with the tip of a finger, his fine brows furrowed. A smile tugs at his lips.

“Whoever that was, he’s a lot bigger than me. But if you give me the exact date, I’ll be delighted to provide you with an alibi. Six days ago, you say? I believe I was visiting a friend.”

Hedges taps the time stamp on the picture. “At two in the morning?” 

“Yeah.” Hickey almost looks sheepish. “My good friend Tozer. I’ve no doubt he’ll corroborate that fact.”

“I know for a fact Tozer’s none too fond of snakes,” Bryant cuts in.

Hickey’s smile climbs an inch closer to his ears. 

“Indeed, I don’t go to Tozer for his snake-handling abilities.”

“Sheriff,” Hedges says, as Bryant’s glare darkens. Her boot connects with his calf. “A word, please.”

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


“This is getting us nowhere.”

“Well, he’s lying like a no-legged dog,” Bryant grumbles.

“I don’t think he believes a word he’s saying, about God or anything else. But it’s the snakes that puzzle me,” Hedges admits. “Why put his life on the line like that? For the adoration of his followers? Do you think it’s rigged?”

“He was dancing with those things, I saw it with my own eyes. It wasn’t rigged.”

“Maybe it’s not actually dangerous. Maybe he milks them.”

“You’re too rational,” Bryant says. “I don’t like that he’s making a mockery of religion and you don’t like that he’s making a mockery of reason, but that ain’t gonna help us nail him for the theft of those snakes, and he wasn’t wrong about that fine. Worse that’s gonna happen to him is he’ll be asked to cough up a couple hundred bucks. And then he’ll go right back to it, with a different snake.”

“Until someone gets hurt,” Hedges remarks.

“You’re suggesting we wait until that happens?”

“Sheriff!” Braine stumbles into the corridor, holding on to the door frame for support. “There’s a man here to see you, says it’s about the snakes.”

Bryant sighs, feeling the rush of the past few hours ebbing away, fatigue settling in. His place is an hour’s drive away from the office - his dinner uncooked, the bed sheets rumpled from his hasty departure this morning so he could swing by the diner for coffee and pie before work. Right now it seems like a reordering of his priorities is in order, except he couldn’t tell where exactly he went wrong: when he prioritized his work ethic over having a life? When he tried to balance that out by taking a half-hour break each day at 6am, allowing himself to conflate happiness with a good cup of coffee and the half-dozen hearts the eighteen-year old waiter keeps drawing on his check?

 _This is a quiet parish, you’ll see,_ Franklin had told him, with the easy-going candour of a man who’d rather close his eyes than look any trouble in the face.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


Magnus Manson is waiting at the front desk, looking even paler than usual, a thin sheen of sweat across his forehead.

“It was me,” he says. “It was me stole the serpents.”


	19. hold fast, brothers and sisters

“Evil exists in our world today. It has always existed and always will exist until the Lord calls a halt to this world as we know it.”

John plants his hands on either side of his lectern, bracing himself against the Sunday morning heat. The sky is full of colossal cloud towers, storms from the Texas plains that will probably blow themselves out long before they reach this little fingersnap of land. Great dark cracks have opened up in the mud outside, and the grass is long and sickly-looking. Tom did not come by to mow it yesterday like he said he would, although John was not surprised.

“But as followers of Jesus Christ, it is for us to realise that evil, too, has its place in God’s plan. To have faith during evil times is an act of courage, and this is what God wants to show us.”

Since the incident at Fitzjames’ garden party, they’d been holding tension between them like a pane of glass, and at last John had let it shatter, saying “ _You shouldn’t have confronted Edward like that_. _You made a scene_ .” And Tom said, “ _He was the one making a scene, I was just looking out for you_.” John had shaken his head, grumbled something unimaginative about not needing anyone to look out for him, and Tom had replied, “ _Like you didn’t need no one that time you got bit by that rattlesnake, and I drove you to the hospital? Or how about that night I brought you home from the bar?”_ John said no, he didn’t remember that bar incident, and Tom had sighed as if to say that John’s lie was disappointing.

“Mark Twain once said: ‘Courage is mastery of fear – not absence of it.’ As I understand it, what he meant was that courage isn’t necessarily the same thing as fearlessness. It’s doing what you know you’ve got to do, even if you’re afraid.”

 _“I know something’s got you scared, John Irving_ ,” Tom had said. He was already in the doorway then, hat in hand, about to leave. “ _But all I got is bits and pieces about what happened to you in them woods_.”

John could see the misty prints of Tom’s bare feet on the cool floor tiles, and he wanted to go to him then, but he was already three fingers of Jim Beam deep, and he didn’t like to get too close to Tom when he’d been drinking. Not after all the things he’d heard about his old man.

 _“I dunno_ ,” Tom said, looking down. “ _I just hope you can find someone to talk to about it, even if that ain’t me._ ” He shut the door hard behind him, familiar by now with the way it stuck in the heat. Familiar with so many little details of John’s life, taking them with him as he went.

“Now, as Christians, courage is central to our daily lives.”

John is sweating under his collar. There is a beam of light coming through a gap in the clapboards behind him, focusing squarely on the back of his neck.

“It’s the foundation of every virtue. It’s impossible to consistently have fellowship with God as long as we’re dominated by fear. Without courage, all of our other virtues will be weak and easily compromised. In order for us to be strong disciples, we must exercise courage at every turn, and remember that when the Lord puts difficult choices in front of you, it’s because He is preparing you for a greater test of that courage.”

John does not read his sermons, the way his father used to. Rather, he learns them by heart and then recites them. How can a congregation be expected to internalise what he’s preaching if he’s simply reading it off a sheet of paper? But even now his congregation is slipping, he can feel it. There are fewer people here today than he’s seen in a long time, and what would his father think of that, if he could see it now? The Mansons are notably absent, leaving a long empty row at the back of the church where they usually sit. The Hoars and the Goldings are gone too, and while Des Voeux Senior is sitting with the Franklins, his son Charlie also seems to be missing. Billy Gibson is nowhere to be seen.

“We are being tested, right now. This community.” John grips the edges of his lectern and folds his lips together for a moment. “We are in the jaws of something here, can’t you feel it?”

A few folks glance at one another – whether in guilt or confusion, he cannot tell – but Jane Franklin is looking at him, nodding earnestly.

John clears his throat, straightens his back. How can a congregation be expected to internalise what he’s preaching if he won’t even practice it himself?

“It would be so easy at a time like this to succumb to fear, but the fact that the Lord seeks to test our courage now means that He has plans for us, and we cannot let Him down. In Ephesians, we are told to put on the full armor of God so that we may take our stand against the Devil’s schemes – _for our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world_ _and against the spiritual forces of evil in heavenly realms_ . And I am, just like each and every one of us here, guilty of sin in the eyes of the Lord, but He has _faith_ in me that I will don his armor; He puts his faith in all of us, and so we must do the same. Hold fast, brothers and sisters, I am begging you to hold fast and remember, _the Lord_ _is with thee, and will keep thee in all places wherever thou goest_.”

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


He waits for sleep all night but it does not come. It’s the heat, he tells himself, but he knows it is more than that. Lying in the same room he has occupied since boyhood, John feels the same raw loneliness that he knew so well as a child. The silent days and the longing flesh that would lead him to press his mouth to the inside of his own hot elbow and imagine what kissing might be like. Tom Hartnell was the only person he’d ever invited up to his room, and now… Now John is being cowardly about it. For all his preaching of courage, he has been a coward about so many things.

He’d watched the crowd disperse after church this morning, strolling back towards their air conditioned cars through the long grass, and to his mind they had all looked far too careless. They hadn’t believed him, about the evil growing in this town. But he knows it’s real, he met it in the trees, and ever since then he has allowed it to fester because he lacked the courage to speak up.

Shaking snakes and drinking poison. He couldn’t avoid hearing about it this time, the women of the Church Committee chattering away right in front of him about that feral place out in the woods. He knows – a bone deep certainty – that those people who were absent today have slipped through his fingers, into the grasp of that… that man.

And then there’s Billy Gibson. John has been a coward about him, too. Billy needs help with his mother, with his job, but all the while he and John waste time dancing around Cornelius Hickey. “The lengths men will go to,” John’s own mother would have said, “not to speak to one another.” It occurs to him now that maybe Billy has built this version of himself – all hammer and nails, rough elbows and hefty plaid shirts (the cuffs of which will never kiss his wrists) – to compensate for another part of him. And perhaps the reason Hickey’s little congregation holds any kind of allure for someone like Billy is because its preacher doesn’t ask him to hide that part of himself away. If this is true then John has let him down indeed.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


Around three in the morning, John hears a clattering coming from below. He creeps down into the church with nothing but a hefty King James bible for a weapon, but the only intruder is a crow flailing on the floorboards. Overhead, John can see where the poor bird has come through a hole in the roof, and he stands there for a moment, gazing up at the small glimpse of sky. Even with the light pollution from the city, there are a few pinpricks of stars.

The crow at his feet gives a deranged caw and flings itself across the aisle, only to land in a crumpled heap. Its wings must be broken, John realises. One is certainly sticking out at a strange angle. He should call Goodsir, but that would mean waking the man in the middle of the night, and in the time it’d take for him to drive over here, the creature could do even further damage to itself. Already its scrabbling talons are leaving scratches in the wood.

John sighs. _Sometimes you do something that frightens you because you fear the consequences of not doing it even more_. That was a line he left out from his sermon because he knew it would have made him a hypocrite.

He looks at the crow, writhing on the floor, and then he looks at the heavy book in his hands. He could do it. He should do it – the poor thing is suffering. _Courage, John_. But he sets the bible down, goes back up to bed, and pulls the pillow down over his ears.

 _Coward, John_.

It’s his own voice he hears though, not Tom’s. Tom would never call him that. He’d probably just say something like: _A crow through your roof, that’s a bad omen_. And he’d probably be right.

Come morning, the bird is dead, and the hole in the roof remains. John calls Billy Gibson to come patch it over, but he gets no answer.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


Main Street smells of hot tarmac and deep fat fryers. From the window of Blanky’s General Store, John watches the heat shimmer above the road and the hoods of cars. It’ll be hell getting up on the church roof on a day like today, but he has to at least put a tarpaulin over that hole, even if he can’t fix it himself. This kind of weather only breaks with a serious storm, and he’s not prepared to risk it on the slim hope he might hear back from Billy before the rain comes.

“That’ll be $10.49,” says Blanky, wincing as he leans down to bag up John’s tarp and a can of bug spray.

“Are you alright?”

“What? Oh, yeah, it’s just this damn leg.” He wraps his knuckles on the side of the prosthetic. “In this weather it’s about as much good as a trapdoor in a canoe.”

“You should really see someone about it, if it’s hurting you that much.”

“Ah, ain’t nothing. Hartnell makes me up a poultice for it, he’s a good boy.”

Blanky quietens then, and John wonders if he figures he’s touched on a sensitive issue. He knows Tom’s friendly with the store owner, but whether or not that means he’d tell him about what’s been going on between them is another matter.

“Tommy Evans said you gave a hell of a sermon yesterday,” Blanky says suddenly. “This whole business really got under your skin, ain’t it? … No, it’s good. The way things are going, someone should say something. Wouldn’t have minded hearing that myself.”

John wouldn’t have minded him being there either, although if Blanky chooses to wedge his bad leg behind a wheel, it’s to head over to the synagogue in Baton Rouge.

“I don’t know. I don’t know what to make of all this. I’ve lived my whole life in this town, but it’s like I’ve turned over a log and found it all rotten on the underside.”

Blanky gives him an odd look then. “Way I see it, these sorts of things don’t happen in a vacuum. Rotten ain’t the word, Reverend, this town is plain dead. The folks in it just haven’t realised that yet. They’re too busy deciding whether they should eat up all their gas money looking for work in the city, or risk the cancer in the chemical plants. They’re tryna find hope in all the wrong places, but you see, once you run outta hope, the mind goes… unnatural with its thoughts.”

“Unnatural?”

“Like drinking strychnine and dancing with rattlers. It’s a tide of darkness, Reverend, with no firm hand to stem it.”

Blanky nods towards the window where Magnus Manson is pulling up in his father’s decrepit truck. John feels himself stiffen.

“I thought he was under arrest?”

“Out on bail, as I heard it.”

The Mansons. What’s the saying? Too poor to paint, too proud to whitewash. John can see how they’re exactly the sort of people Blanky’s talking about. He knows they used to make decent enough money selling their steers at the cattle auctions over in Fort Worth, but with what it takes to haul everything to Texas and back, coupled with the declining beef sales and the rising costs of keeping cattle in the first place, they’re now barely turning a profit. It’s the same story up and down this river. Jobs and families falling apart. He doesn’t know what Hickey’s offering them, but he can see how easily someone like that could slip in amongst them and promise something better than this life. Even if it’s just a promise that they can wipe the dirt off his boots when he’s finished climbing over them.

But Manson’s release may be a blessing of sorts, in its own way. He is, at least, the only person from town with a confirmed connection to the snake-handling outfit. If Billy Gibson is caught up in it, Manson will know, surely.

Manson starts when he sees him – that deer-in-the-headlights expression that always looks so juxtaposed on a man of his size.

“You keeping okay, Magnus?” It comes out sounding more like an accusation. “Must have been quite an ordeal, being arrested.”

Manson nods, glancing up and down the street quickly. “S’alright.”

“It was good of you to come forward about those snakes, you know. It’s always better to tell the truth, don’t you think?”

“Suppose so.” Manson swallows. “Yes, Reverend.”

“Listen, I’ve been trying to get hold of Billy Gibson, you haven’t seen him around lately, have you?”

“No, Reverend. Sir.”

But John can hear the keys in Manson’s hand jangling as he fidgets.

“Is that the truth, Magnus?”

“Billy’s not…around.”

“What does that mean? Where’s he gone?”

Manson presses his lips together tightly.

“Magnus, what does that _mean_?”

But the question comes out too loud, and Manson bolts back into his truck, big eyes staring wildly at John as he peels away from the store with a screech and a cloud of dust.

John feels as though someone has just dropped a big heavy stone down his gullet. Something has happened to Billy and Manson knows it. He recognises the fear he saw in the other man’s face because he’d felt it himself, when he was lying in the grass of the old sawmill and Cornelius Hickey stood over him, holding that rattlesnake. _All my fault,_ John thinks, _God in Heaven this is all my fault._ If he had only gone to the police about Hickey sooner, maybe Billy wouldn’t have fallen in with him, maybe he could have kept him safe. Maybe those snakes would never have gone missing from the animal sanctuary, maybe Sophia and Edward wouldn’t have gotten caught up in it, Edward might never have shouted at Tom at the garden party, and Tom – God, Tom!

Perhaps Tom wouldn’t have stood there with his heart turned all inside out and said, “ _I just hope you can find someone to talk to about it, even if that ain’t me_.”

Irving squeezes his nails into his hands and sets off at a brisk pace towards his car. Talking won’t do much good now. The time for sitting by and doing nothing has passed – this whole mess with Hickey won’t be another battered crow crawling around on his church floor.

 _The Lord is with me,_ he tells himself. _The Lord is with me and keeps me wherever I go_.


	20. out by the woods

Early in the morning, before the sun has risen proper and the factory has woken up to leave its daily stain on the sky, it’s just thirty black miles of backroads criss-crossing the bayou. Silna has been taking these dawn drives ever since she arrived. She might be familiar with the routes by now, but that’s not enough. She has to get under the skin of this place. _A good hunter,_ her father used to say, _always understands the terrain in which he hunts. Otherwise you’ll be the one carried away in the jaws of the landscape_.

It’s partly for work, but also because there’s an ugliness to this town, and Silna refuses to close her eyes to it. She’s travelled from one side of the North American continent to the other, looping around at the end and doing it again a few inches north-by-north-west, and she’s seen blood red moons on the plains and howled with the timberwolves in Alaska and scaled more than one of the Colorado fourteeners – but if there’s one thing she’s learned, no matter how well you know the bones of a country, people will always give you trouble if they see you as an outsider.

Water vapour rising off the river makes ghosts among the cypresses. From the corner of her eye she catches sight of a deer keeping pace with the jeep for a few moments, before the tree coverage breaks and the creature bounds away over the white tombs of a little broken down cemetery. Mossy timbers of an old church point east towards the sunrise.

She comes around a bend sharply, her jeep bouncing over the potholes, headlights licking up the tarmac, and suddenly something is different. There is a man on the road.

Silna doesn’t slam on the brakes, but slows the car as gently as she can, the way she once did up in the Rockies when she came upon a wolf crossing the track. She can feel the hairs rising on the back of her neck now, just as she did then. Men and wolves aren’t so different.

He is standing with his shoulders drawn up, arms encircling himself as if he were cold, although the temperature gauge on the dashboard says it’s already 60 degrees. When the jeep rolls to a stop he looks up, his stricken face dashed with road dust and little scratches, as though he has been running through the trees. Silna recognises him, enough that she feels comfortable rolling down the window and calling out,

“Pastor Irving? Are you alright?”

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


The reverend is silent in the passenger seat as they follow the twisting roads back towards the town. His hands are trembling in his lap. Silna tries not to look; the last time he noticed her eyes on him he looked so embarrassed, she felt as if she’d seen him naked.

“Anyone I can call for you?” she’d asked, as she coaxed him into the jeep. She was thinking of the barefoot cajun boy whom she often spotted on the river with his brothers and sisters – whom she had once seen taking the reverend’s hand down by the creek – but Irving shook his head. Silna felt she ought to call someone, all the same. She knew the reverend by reputation, but no more than that. It seemed what he needed was someone familiar, so in the end she’d phoned Sophia.

“I’m at Edward’s house,” Sophia had told her. “Jesus, poor John, you’d better bring him over. Do you know the way?”

 _Of course I do_ , she thinks now, as they speed through the long daybreak shadows of moss and branches, past the town limit sign speckled with bullet holes. Everyone around here knows where the Gun House is. Silna made sure to learn quick, the better to avoid it. Some places are bad places and there’s little you can do about it. She can’t shake the feeling that the Hayter house could carry her off in its jaws if it decided to.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


Sophia is waiting on the porch as they pull up, her hair lifting gently in an early breeze. The air is cool enough to raise gooseflesh on Silna’s arms. Behind the house, the sunrise streaks the sky with yellow and lilac, but the building itself is fading away, as if it were sinking into its own cold shadow.

Sophia has a romantic soul, Silna knows, but she is a woman of reason first and foremost. The stories about the Gun House won’t keep her from visiting her black-eyed friend. Silna’s wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the rumours herself. Up and down the country, she’s heard stories of every creature, spirit and devil that people believe in, but there are none more real than the ghosts that unhappy folk drag around with them. She’s also heard plenty of talk about the Hayters and Littles, especially about Edward Little’s grandfather, and she figures, if anything’s going to leave a ghost behind, it’d be something like that: unhappy marriages and ammunition. 

“John!” Sophia hurries down to the drive and slings an arm around his shoulders as he emerges from the car. “Are you alright? Come on, let’s get you inside. Edward’s just made some sweet tea, you’ll want to have some, come on.”

 _She’s good at this_ , Silna thinks, watching her maneuver Irving up towards the house. Good at looking after men. It’s why she’s here so early in the morning, wearing a wrinkled blouse that she’s clearly slept in, her hair unwashed, her mascara leaving dusty smudges around her eyes. Edward Little is afraid of his haunted house, and so Sophia went off last night to sit with him until the sun came up. Silna knows because she’d had her own plans to watch the sun rise with Sophia.

In the kitchen that smells of stale coffee and swamp damp, Edward pretends to dry the same spoon over and over, while Irving sips his tea and stares at the dirt on his wingtip shoes. In a way she can’t quite articulate, it bothers Silna that they’re not saying anything. Perhaps it’s the way these men were raised – some 19th century kind of neglect for their social skills, coupled with the lonely masculine atmosphere of this house. But this is Edward’s house, he should be taking charge of the situation and not just leaving it to Sophia to stroke Irving’s shoulder and encourage him to drink a little more. They didn’t see the reverend like she did, Silna thinks. He is no longer trembling, but in that moment when he’d first looked up at her, his face had held a certain awful anticipation, as though he was expecting to see someone else. Somebody needs to ask the question, even if Edward won’t.

“Pastor Irving,” she says, “can you tell us what happened to you?”

She can see too much of the whites of his eyes, like a rabbit in a trap, but he swallows another mouthful of sweet tea and says, with remarkable calm,

“It was nothing. I’m alright now, ma’am, thank you.”

“But what were you doing out by the woods so early?”

Edward pauses in his spoon-drying. “Out by the woods?”

Irving frowns. “Really, it’s nothing to worry about. I… had to see a parishioner. Billy Gibson. His mother isn’t well, and I’ve been meaning to look in on him for some time now. I got turned around in the dark looking for my car. It shook me up, that’s all.” He takes a long sip of tea, the glass hiding his face as he drinks.

Silna sighs and sits back in her chair. Whatever happened to him out there, the good reverend clearly doesn’t want to talk about it – at least not in front of outsiders.

But Edward’s presence in the kitchen seems to have altered too, unable to stand still. Sophia keeps glancing at him, like it’s making her nervous, so Silna says,

“Mr. Little, I never got to thank you properly, for looking for those snakes.”

“Oh, well.” Edward clears his throat, straightens up a little. “It was no problem. I trust you got them all back – the snakes?”

“One of the deputies brought them round yesterday.”

Some jittery kid who held the box at arm’s length and visibly flinched when Harry Goodsir opened it. She was glad Harry was there, even if he did talk about freshwater crabs for a full hour afterwards. Silna has never enjoyed dealing with the police; in the way they look at her – especially that Deputy Daly – she can discern a sort of inherent distrust. But Harry is one of those people who always manages to put everyone at ease just by being there. The kid – Braine, she thinks he was called – had even called her _ma’am_ as he left, which had never happened before.

“Not all of them though,” Sophia pipes up, clearly keen to keep the conversation going. “There’s still one missing, you said?”

Silna is about to say yes, a rare albino rattler that she’s anxious to have back, it’s the kind of creature that won’t survive long on its own or in incompetent hands, but Irving takes a sharp, sudden breath, and the room falls silent again.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


“Something’s not right,” Silna says quietly.

They’re alone in the living room, Sophia folding up the blankets on the couch where she slept the night before. She casts a wary eye back towards the kitchen door. “You said you found the reverend out by Three Oaks, right? The Gibsons don’t live that far out, that’s a hell of a way to overshoot, even in the dark.” She turns back to Silna. “John’s lying.”

“I could have told you that.”

“But that’s not like him. I’m worried about him, I think we should take him back to town with us when we go.”

“What about your car?”

Sophia crosses her arms, fiddling with the sleeve of her blouse. “I was hoping I could get a ride back with you. If that’s okay? We can swing by the diner, I’ll buy you a bear claw – make up for disappearing on you last night.”

Silna shrugs. “You had to look out for your friend.”

“Well.” Sophia glances at the reverend through the sliver of open door as he sips his tea. “Maybe I was looking after the wrong one.”

They can hear the low mutter of conversation drifting from the kitchen; Edward’s deep, hesitant voice and Irving’s soft, brief replies. Silna wonders how many conversations between men have taken place in this house that women only half overheard.

“…and you were the one who warned me about that place in the woods to begin with,” Edward is saying. “And you were right. Everything that’s come out these last few days about that church sounds… Hell, John, I just don’t understand why you’d go there alone.”

“It’s a matter of faith.”

Edward says something too quiet for Silna to catch, but she hears Irving sigh.

“God protected me last time. I had to believe He would do so again.”

“Last time?”

“When I was bitten, a few months back, I… I was out there.”

Silna looks at Sophia, who is staring wide-eyed through the door.

“Serpents don’t have nothing to do with God or the Devil,” Irving continues, although he is quieter now and they have to strain to hear him. “I let that man – that Hickey – talk me into holding one because… because… It was pure vanity, Edward. I wanted to prove myself the holier man.”

Sophia groans and pushes the door all the way open, causing both men to straighten up suddenly.

“John,” she says. “You almost got yourself killed because you were trying to one-up some religious zealot, is that what you’re saying?”

The reverend colours. “God was with me, even in that wild place. He saved my life.”

Edward frowns. “I heard it was Tom Hartnell who drove you to the hospital.”

Irving stares down at the tea dregs in his glass. Silna decides to put him out of his misery.

“We’re heading back to town now, Pastor. We can give you a ride, if you’re feeling up to it.”

“Yes.” He doesn’t look up. “I believe I’m myself again now.”

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


“I don’t know what’s gotten into everyone lately,” Sophia mutters, as they turn out of the Littles’ drive onto the county road. “It feels like the whole town’s going crazy.”

Silna nods. It’s the same feeling she used to get crouched in her father’s boat, frost glueing her eyelashes together, harpoon in hand, poised above the surface of the water. In the depths below she would see the mass of some great shadowy thing and she would feel just as she feels now: on the brink of something.

“Oh, Jesus, watch out!”

Sophia braces herself against the dashboard just as Silna swerves off to the side of the road to avoid the truck speeding past.

“Jesus, hell, what was he thinking?” Sophia rolls down the window and sticks her head out. “Oh we’re fine, pal, don’t worry about us!” But the truck is already out of sight, with nothing to say it was ever there besides a cloud of yellow dust and their own nervous breathing.

“You okay, Pastor?”

Silna twists round in her seat to look at Irving, but he is staring out of the back window. The dust is taking a long time to settle in the still air. The reverend’s hand is fidgeting in his lap again.

“I know that truck,” he says.


	21. them that believe

Once Sophia and Silna have left, taking a grim-faced John along with them, Edward retreats to the levee with his phone and a bottle of liquor he found in the cellar, which bears the self-explanatory label _Collins’ Home Brew ‘17._ Three days have passed since Jamie left a voicemail on Edward’s phone, and in those three days Edward has found a variety of reasons not to return his brother’s call, the last of which being Silna and John’s unexpected apparition. 

Edward has never been much good at looking after people, and in this particular case he’s got an inkling that what John needs isn’t someone to look after him - for all intents and purposes, he’s already found the right person to do that - but rather some sort of spiritual counsel. Edward hasn’t got much faith to share or to spare. He used to believe in rules and manners and in something he’d call “good behavior”, but principles never got his mother anywhere and it seems those of his siblings who don’t burden themselves with such constraints are the ones who go far in life, even as he continues to tread water.

“Edward! Finally.” 

Jamie sounds exasperated. This was to be expected - there’d also been a few missed calls from Eliza, but Edward made a conscious decision to endure Jamie’s irritation rather than what would no doubt have been an hour-long lecture from their older sister.

“Reception can’t be so bad in the house that you missed all of my calls,” Jamie says. “Unless you were hiding under the kitchen sink again? Decades on and you’re still very good at shirking your responsibilities.”

Edward sets the phone on speaker and attacks the bottle’s cork with Old Si’s massive old corkscrew, the oak handle slippery against his damp palm.

“I was busy.”

“You were busy,” James intones. With every passing year his sarcasm becomes less playful and more bitter. “Doing what? Don’t tell me you were shooting cans in the trailer park.”

“I’m not sixteen anymore,” Edward reminds him, before he takes a swig from the bottle. It does rankle that Jamie’s recycled jabs should hit so close to home.

“Is it done then?”

“It takes time to sell a house.”

“Sure,” Jamie agrees. “When you subscribe to southern standards of slow living. Did you get in touch with Old Si’s realtor friend? What was his name? Barrow?”

“I’ll give him a call.”

“Give him a call yesterday.”

Edward takes another long gulp of Collins’ rotgut and sets the bottle down beside him, cradled in tall grass. Below him the river churns driftwood and plastic waste, the remnants of a storm.

“Don’t boss me around.”

“You’re the one who insisted you could take care of this.”

“I was politely asked to do it,” Edward corrects him. “By Jane. Because the rest of you were…” _Afraid of the house._ Jamie will never admit to it, he who wouldn’t go inside the house alone when it was empty, who used to bully his younger siblings into retrieving his magazine, or his sunglasses, or his iced tea, so he wouldn’t have to risk the empty halls and their whispers, the frames falling down without warning from the walls, _Old houses need to breathe, too, that’s all there is to it,_ their mother would say, even as she glanced quickly over her shoulder, as if she’d heard them, too, the sound of footsteps coming down the empty corridor. 

“... Because you guys were busy,” he finishes.

“We didn’t make you do it.” Jamie has always been very good at deflecting blame. “Nobody asked you to quit your fancy office job in order to come down. Come on, Edward. A month is more than enough time spent in that cesspit of a town. Offload the house, go back to Boston, I’ll give a few calls and we’ll find you the exact same job you used to have, only better.”

Edward wonders if he should remind Jamie that he doesn’t live in Boston, never has for that matter, but it does seem like a waste of breath.

“I’ll get rid of the house. How about you go fuck yourself?”

“Elegant,” James snorts, before he hangs up.

Edward is still staring down moodily at his phone when he hears the sound of a twig snapping underfoot. Turning around, he finds Sol leaning against the nearest oak tree. Judging from his foreboding expression, he must have been here a while.

“So that’s why you came back, then,” Sol says, hands balled deep inside the pockets of his old jeans. “You only came home so you could leave for good.”

“Has this place ever been home, really?” Edward asks, making no effort to mask his annoyance, the fruitless conversation with James and the memory of John’s stumbling walk to Sophia’s car igniting something inside him.

“That house belongs to you.”

Edward settles for his most reasonable tone, the one he used to adopt at work when one of the firm’s rich clients would not listen to reason.

“According to my father’s will, it belongs to all seven of us, and we’ve agreed that selling it would be the best…” 

“It belongs to you,” Sol insists.

“A haunted house,” Edward scoffs.

“If this place is haunted by anything, it’s by you. The memory of you. It comes alive when you’re here - it wants you to stay.”

Edward picks up the bottle and corkscrew and after a moment’s consideration, he takes another swig of the throat-scorching shine.

“Can you hear yourself?” he asks, his voice hoarse, as he starts walking back towards the house. “Sol, it’s just a goddamn house, it’s not a person. If I had the guts, I’d burn the place to the ground, for all the love I’ve got for it.” 

Even as he says it he keeps looking at his dusty oxfords, refusing to raise his eyes towards the gabled and turreted roof. He can’t find the courage to look at Sol either, not when he knows that a glance would cause him to step sideways in the hope of breathing in Sol’s smell, of feeling Sol’s hand brush against his lower back. He has been stoking this anger for days, perhaps longer, and it isn’t so much directed at Sol than at the way this place keeps coiling itself around him and refusing to let him go, and he’s starting to realise that he’s never tried to break free, not really. Even as he left for college, even as he bought an apartment in Chicago and filled it with the kind of streamlined furniture that is first and foremost an artistic statement, he expected he’d return eventually, to live and die here, and be buried alongside the other Hayter-Littles in the family plot.

“Seems to me that you only came back to make a mess of things.”

Sol’s tone has hardened; maybe it sounds all the harsher to Edward because until now, there’d been something almost soft about the way he spoke, like maybe he thought this would turn things around for the both of them, this display of tenderness.

“I came to see how you were, but maybe I shouldn’t have bothered.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t have,” Edward agrees, rather pettily. “Where d’you come from anyways, the woods? Been shaking snakes around again? Were you there when John came round?” He sneaks a glance at Sol’s stubborn profile. “Were you there when he was bit?”

“You know you’re always doing this?” Sol gestures in Edward’s direction. “Acting like you’re better than me. I swear to God you’re stuck up higher than a light-pole.”

Edward stomps up the porch steps. “That was hardly an answer, you asshole.” To his despair, the curse comes out sounding like a confession. _Look how much you made me care about you,_ rather than, _I don’t care at all._

“I wasn’t there,” Sol says. “I don’t think anyone was, I think it was only the two of them. Cornelius’ always had a thing for your preacher friend. Some kind of interest. Bad blood. I don’t know. Does it make a difference, that I wasn’t there?”

Edward sets the bottle and corkscrew down on the table and keeps on walking, out of the kitchen and into the hallway. It seems prudent to do so. When he begins to climb the stairs he couldn’t say if he’s trying to get Sol to follow him, to resolve this row in bed as they did the last time, or if he wants to put some distance between them, to look down on him the way Sol accused him of doing. Sol halts at the bottom of the stairs. Edward thinks of the day Sol had returned his car, how he’d been relieved he hadn’t left his rifle within Sol’s reach. It’s less to do with what Sol said than with what he didn’t, what Edward doesn’t know and can only guess at, firelit shadows dancing with snakes in the back of a crumbling house, men willingly drinking poison inside the old saw mill. John who abhors liars and Sol who abhors snakes and the both of them agreeing to hold one because Hickey had told them to.

Edward is more than willing to be afraid, but he’s having a hard time deciding who or what, exactly, he should be afraid of: Sol or Hickey or Hickey’s growing influence on this town, even now, after they’ve confiscated his snakes and arrested a member of his congregation.

“Why?” he asks. “Hodgson, Gibson, I can understand. But you… Why?”

Through the living-room windows, the sun is setting on Sol, setting fire to his brown hair.

“I ain’t never gonna leave this place. What he gives us, it’s like an escape.” Sol whispers the words like an incantation: “And these signs shall follow them that believe: In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues. They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover…”

“And you believe it?” Edward’s hollow laugh echoes across the hall. “You think he’s gonna cure you?”

“Sure did help after you fucked off.”

Edward gapes at him. 

“So this is what it’s all about? What did you expect me to do, stay in this…” Jamie’s words return to him and he casts them at Sol with unbridled violence, “... this cesspit of a town?”

“You haven’t changed,” Sol says, in a rough murmur laced with disappointment. “Always did think running away was an answer to all your troubles. As if they’d just vanish while you were away.” His gaze hardens. “Well, Edward, it might have worked with your grandpa and your dad, but the rest of us ain’t gonna drop dead just to make things easier for you.”

“How dare you,” Edward snaps, with the sort of petulance only his siblings used to be capable of, the older ones, those who never doubted that they’d inherit the largest slice of the cake. 

Sol takes a step back, his eyes to the ceiling where the prisms of the old chandelier are swaying slightly.

“How about we pick up this conversation when you’ve calmed down?” he suggests. “If that’s what you want. I gotta say though, if I wake up tomorrow and the house is sold and you’ve disappeared again, I won’t be surprised.”

“And you say I’m the one who runs! If you even think of walking out on me, I’ll...”

The words curdle in Edward’s mouth the second he understands where they came from. Old Si never raised his voice. He delivered the cruellest threats in an even, patient drawl. _If you even think of walking out, son… If you even think of putting down that gun… If you even think of putting down that drink with a drop of whiskey still in it, I’ll..._

“You’ll what?” Sol asks. “You’ll shoot me? You’ll drop that chandelier on me? We both know you don’t have the balls to do any of that.”

Edward remains frozen on the stairs, holding the banister in a white-knuckled grip. He doesn’t have any idea how to answer Sol’s taunt, couldn’t say if Sol expected him to, if it was an invitation or a parting slap. He doesn’t say another word as Sol stalks out and the front door slams shut behind him, as he starts up the truck and the sound of the engine recedes in the distance.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


Edward had shot Sol once. It was an accident.

Whenever Edward looks back on that day, what comes back to him is the summer haze, not so much golden but rather a dusty brown, like the muddy water was rising along with the roots of the cypress trees, drifting further up still to cling to any inch of exposed skin. The air was thick enough to leave a lasting, mossy taste on the tongue. Edward’s hands were damp and there was sweat in his eyes. It was no excuse for how much he missed the mark, his foot sinking into a water hole as he was about to shoot the bottle, but Sol never reproached him for it. Only looked at his bleeding shoulder, his face gone pale in spite of that summer hale. “You’re gonna have to drive me to the hospital,” he’d said.

“Sol, I’m...” Edward was still holding the rifle, his hand shaking upon the barrel. “I’m...”

“Now would be good,” Sol remarked. “Before I pass out.”

The nearest hospital was in Baton Rouge, forty-five minutes down the highway, but Edward made it in thirty, thinking somewhere in the back of his mind that there would be hell to pay when the fine for running that red light got mailed to his house, but he told himself he'd worry about it later, one eye on Sol sprawled in the backseat slowly raising a cigarette to his mouth.

"Keep talking to me," Edward said, stepping on the gas to overtake another eighteen-wheeler. That's what they always said on TV, keep them talking so they don't pass out. "Tell me something about – I don't know, anything! Please, Sol…"

Sol's hands were red from where he'd been holding his shoulder, trying to stem the bleeding, and now even his cigarette had bloody fingerprints on it. His head slumped back against the seat, and Edward said, "Jeez, Sol, say something, come on, tell me – tell me what you're thinking right now."

And Sol had grinned drowsily at him in the rearview mirror and said, words slurring, "Thinkin about having you in this backseat someday, Little…"

They’d never got around to doing that. Edward had thought about it afterwards, from time to time and with a vague sense of regret. It’d never been about the guns after all, not for him. There’d always been something far more exciting about Sol himself, and the thought of Sol touching him, and the thought of Sol coming back for more, like maybe the feeling was mutual, and one day they would meet empty-handed, just the two of them, without any weapons or excuses. 

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


He takes the hunting rifle because it seems foolish not to, because it’s what any Little would have done in his situation, preparing to confront a predator on its own territory.

The sun is setting fast behind the trees, glowing red between black trunks. Edward grits his teeth as he clenches the steering wheel and wonders if this is how John had felt as he went into the forest earlier that day, like he was heading towards a fight he knew he would lose.

As to what will happen when he meets Hickey, Edward has thought about it, imagining various scenarios as he drives along the Fairholmes’ _Helena_ and the Hodgsons’ _La Mélodie_ and the small riverside settlement and then the deeper stretch of woods beyond it. What he wants is to tell Hickey to leave and never come back, and he would like to believe that his words will carry weight with the might of a gun in his hands, but he’s heard enough about Hickey to know he won’t back down in front of such a threat. Most likely, he’ll twist Edward’s words around until the gun is pointed at his throat, and Edward will welcome the bullet like others before him, Gibson who might be nursing a snake bite somewhere, and Manson confessing to a crime he probably didn’t commit, and Sol whom Edward had once seen go grey with fear at the sight of a cottonmouth and who’s apparently happy to worship snakes in the backwoods. Reluctant as he is to admit it, Edward is aware that part of what drives him is a desire to witness for himself the sort of power Hickey wields over people, over Sol, because Edward had taken away with him to Virginia the idea that Sol couldn’t be broken, couldn’t be hurt or changed. Easier to leave when you think you’re leaving behind a fortress rather than a man. _Sure did help after you fucked off._ What was it that Sol had found helpful, exactly? Hickey’s religion, Hickey’s words, Hickey’s mouth and hands?

 _I’m doing this for John,_ Edward tells himself as he swerves away from the road and onto the dirt track leading into the woods, but he’s never been any good at lying, not even to himself it would seem. He’s rolled down the window and the sounds of the forest are drifting in, carried along on the cooler night breeze, chirpings and hootings and nearby rustlings. _Perfect night for a wander,_ he’d have thought, years and years ago, when the only devil he knew lived inside his own house. 

When and if he comes home, he’ll go back inside Old Si’s office and he’ll break apart every lock, smash every cabinet and toss the empty guns on a heap on the floor for the hunting store to choose from. He’ll throw open all the cramped windows, let in the warm summer air. And then maybe he’ll give Jane a call and see if a deal can be made where his siblings get his shares in the family business, and he gets the house.

“I’m done running,” he tells the forest, wishing he’d had the nerve to tell Sol instead.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


There’s quite a few cars and trucks parked outside the old saw mill. Edward recognises Sol’s dusty brown truck and makes himself walk on, the rifle slung over his shoulder, until he’s reached the circle of light cast by the portable lamp propped above the door, and the man in the doorway has seen him and welcomed him with an extended arm.

“Good evening traveller. Have you come to join the service?” Edward’s frown of suspicion doesn’t seem to deter him, nor does the rifle. “Do you wish to witness the Holy Ghost move among God’s people? Then you are most welcome. Are you here out of curiosity, undecided yet as to the purpose of your visit?” The man’s pale eyes flicker to the rifle and back to the tense set of Edward’s jaw. “Then you are also welcome.”

“Edward.”

Sol has appeared at the man’s shoulder, a troubled look in his eye.

“What are you doing here?”

“Ah,” the man smiles at Sol. “So this is the infamous Edward Little. The reason why you have been avoiding us, lately.” 

He says “us” and Edward hears “me”. Whatever he expected Hickey to look like, it wasn’t this: a small and slender man with reddish blond hair, clear eyes that narrow to slits when he smiles, which he does often and with ease. The lamp above the door bathes his pale face in an orange glow.

“Has Solomon told you of our ways, Mr Little? We must greet each other before I let you in.”

“Cornelius.”

Sol is spoiling for a fight and must have been since he left the house. His menacing tone seems to please Hickey, and before either Edward or Sol can say anything else, Hickey has sprung forward and kissed Edward on the mouth. In the ensuing fumble, Edward’s shoulder colliding with the doorframe as he tries to move away, he almost drops the rifle and he holds it, breathless, against his chest, as if that would protect him. Hickey’s mouth was warm; before he retreated, Edward had felt the rasp of his tongue against his lower lip. He rubs the back of his hand against his mouth.

“Romans 16:16,” Hickey smiles. “Salute one another with a Holy Kiss. Well then, will you come in?”

At a glance, Edward would say that there are a dozen people in the saw mill, though the room is only lit by a few hurricane lamps and most of the men are standing too far for him to make out who they are. He reasserts his grip on the rifle.

“Will you come in and repent?” Hickey smiles. “Or will you go back whence you came? Chicago, I believe? That’s gonna be a long drive.”

There’s a clear warning in Hickey’s voice. For all of his words of welcome, he doesn’t want Edward to stay. Edward tries to gauge the silhouettes inside the mill, wondering how many of those men are armed, how many of them will shoot if Hickey asks them to. 

Hickey abandons his menacing tone just as abruptly, stepping away from Edward and crying out, “Sign followers! Let us gather and pray.”

“I can drive you home,” Sol offers. Now that the confrontation has ended without bloodshed on this odd, inconclusive note, Sol seems profoundly tired. When Edward edges away from him he seems to fold in on himself, his big shoulders slumping, his eyes turned down on his boots. “Edward…”

On the other side of the room, Hickey has begun what Edward has no doubt must be a captivating spiel about the remission of sins and what it means to “lead a godly life”.

“And it is only then,” he proclaims, his eyes surveying his flock, “that you will receive the power of the Holy Ghost.”

“What is he even wearing?” Edward wonders aloud, gazing at what appears to be a one-piece in faded white fabric.

“His Church believes in plain clothing,” Sol grumbles. “Although it’s not like he does, personally. It’s only part of the whole show.”

“It is our duty,” Hickey continues, “to fight the powers of evil… Every day, each and every one of you must take on the Devil, and the Devil, my brothers, oh, he has many faces…” Stepping forward, he places both hands on the nearest man’s shoulders. “He is the friend who will get real close to you, under your skin so to speak, as he suggests you both get another drink…” Moving on to the man’s neighbour, whose tall stature gives him away as Magnus Manson, Hickey gives Magnus’ large elbow a gentle rub. “He is the shadow waiting by your bed at night, as you toss and turn because of some bad dream…” And on to the next man, whose hands he grips with apparent fondness. “He speaks through the mouth of your foreman, of the kind old lady who never misses a church fair, but who’ll spread stories about you until there’s so much muck on your name no spitting on it will ever make it shine as it once did.” Having reached the alley between the benches, he spares a moment to look towards Sol and Edward. “The forces of evil never want for nothing,” he declares, “don’t matter if they crawl or walk, if they live under a bridge or in a big house with the symbols of its ill-acquired wealth carved into the pillars on the front porch. The Devil goes hand in hand with witches, but what they won’t tell you is…” He smiles at his flock. “He can also be the son of a preacher, who was the son of a preacher… There is nothing more dangerous, my friends, than a veneer of respectability. You have to follow the signs. God speaks the truth in wonders.”

“Can’t look away, can you?”

Edward almost jumps. Sol’s voice has brought him back to himself, although he couldn’t say what he’d been about to do, exactly: step forward and take his place on one of the benches, or take a shot at Hickey. The gun is ready in his hands, but it feels heavier than it had minutes ago. Surely there has to be things he’d meant to say to Sol, things that would ground him; if only he could remember them now.

“Was it you?” he asks. “Was it you put the birds on my doorstep?” 

Sol gives him a look like Edward might as well have spat in his face.

“You think I’d do something like that?” Sol shakes his head in disgust. “No, and I didn’t flatten your tires. But it wasn’t Hickey, if that’s what you’re really asking. He wouldn’t have done it himself. He’s very good at getting people to obey orders he never gave. Magnus would do anything for him. Thinks Cornelius cured him of some ghosts that were after him.”

“I don’t… That’s not what I was asking,” Edward stumbles. “I don’t really care what Hickey did and didn’t do, what matters to me is… Whether you had a hand in it or not.”

“Is that why you came here with a rifle? Because you don’t care about Hickey?” Sol snorts. “You want the full story? Fine then. I’ll give it to you. We used to meet in a cabin in the woods, me and him. Before the whole… preaching thing. He knows I hate snakes, he always knew. No greater power than knowing people’s fears, he says. Told me I was different from the others, but I know I ain’t the only one he met with in that cabin. That’s where they brought Billy after he got bit. A true believer doesn’t seek medical assistance, you’re supposed to sweat it out. Billy died in silence, never complained once. Every night that I come here I pray that this time around…”

Edward stares at him, as if that would make the shadows resolve into meaning. It’s still Sol, though, it’s always been, arms crossed over an old t-shirt, giving him that flat stare that used to be so daunting. Edward looks down at the rifle. “You can’t really believe any of this is true. That it’s worth _dying for_ … Can you?”

Sol turns towards the makeshift stage, where Hickey has beckoned a young man forward with an upraised arm. He doesn’t answer.

“And the Lord said to them, Behold, I give unto you the power to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over the power of the enemy: and nothing by any means shall hurt you…”

The young man has placed a box at Hickey’s feet, and he leans down, scooping its contents with careful hands.

“It is not given unto any man to take up serpents, and I prayed and fasted for days and weeks and months before the Lord heeded my prayer. But at last he moved on me, and I knew then that it was his will that I should handle them.”

The snake in Hickey’s hands is an eerie sight, coil upon coil of creamy white, its silent rattle tinted pink.

“Who will be next?” Hickey shouts. “Who will follow the signs?” He has locked eyes with Solomon, some private thing passing between them that Edward can’t intercept, and they’re still looking at each other when the snake jerks and falls from Hickey’s hands to the beaten earth, causing the front row to back away in a frenzy.

Hickey looks down at his hand as if he can’t quite believe what has just happened. Even from the opposite side of the room, Edward can see the bite gleaming red. The snake slithers off into the darkness as several members of the crowd come forward to assist Hickey; others have fallen to their knees. In the confusion, the panicked cries overlap with the prayers. The men have become twisted shadows and Hickey stands pale among them in the light from the hurricane lamps. Edward steps forward without thinking, going where the crowd has grown thick. Later he’ll think that maybe he was trying to help, but he’ll never be sure of that. Maybe he just wanted to make sure he saw it all, right up until the final curtain.

“Magnus, I need...” Hickey mumbles from the cradle of Magnus Manson’s arms as he tries to get back to his feet. Already his hand has swollen and discolored. “Quick. You can drive me. If we go now, maybe…”

Edward’s right-hand neighbour is loudly reciting the Lord’s prayer and someone else is muttering gibberish on his left, but it doesn’t quite drown out Manson’s answer.

“Your time has come, Preacher. It’s the way you said. It’s like it was for Billy. Your time has come.”

Strangely enough, it’s not the sight of Hickey misshapen hand and clammy skin that disturbs Edward the most, but the quiet of Manson’s tone, the intimacy and the finality of it. It spurs him to look back towards the entrance of the mill, where he can only glimpse Sol out on the porch.

He’s gone and lit himself a cigarette.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


In the end, Edward joins him. He knows better than to comment on the naked relief on Sol’s face, or on the way the tension seems to have drained out of his body. When Sol offers him a cigarette he takes it, and leans forward to let Sol light it with his own.

“I called 911,” Edward informs him. “And the sheriff’s office. Nobody else seemed in a hurry to do so.”

“You might want to put away that gun then,” Sol remarks. “Before someone starts asking questions.”

“Are you… Will you be alright?”

Sol huffs.

“There’s been two good things happened to me in ten years, and one of them was my dirtbag uncle dying and giving me that shop, and the other was you coming back. The rest… The rest’s been a goddamn awful tangle.”

As the sound of sirens draw near, the men inside the mill file out and scatter into the woods, leaving their cars and trucks behind, until it’s only Sol and Edward on the porch and Manson inside sitting on the ground, holding Hickey’s body in his arms.

In those last moments before the cavalry marches in, what comes to Edward’s mind isn’t the remains of any Bible studies, but a conversation he’d once had with John about art, about those artists who’d include reminders in their still-lives of the eventual death of all things, flies in the blooming flowers, skulls besides the pearls and ornate mirrors, and John had said, _They’ve all read Ecclesiastes,_ and now Edward quotes it as well under his breath, as a cruel eulogy.

“Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.”


	22. sanctuary

It’s a bewitching contrast, Sophia thinks—Silna’s dark complexion with the marbled creamy white of the snake, even in the greenish tint of the sanctuary, the light from a dozen heat lamps filtered through various leaves. The clinical smell of linoleum and veterinary chemicals is overpowered by the metallic scent of the reptiles. _Like holding a coin in your mouth,_ Sophia thinks. _Almost bloody_. Fitting, after everything that’s happened.

“I heard it bit clean through an artery in that preacher’s hand,” Fitzjames is saying. “Must have been blood everywhere. Dead in minutes.”

“James,” Francis mutters, which makes Sophia smile. He’s always had an old-fashioned sort of notion about the kind of things that ought not to be said in the presence of ladies.

Silna nods. “These diamondback rattlesnakes have a mean bite on them if you get them riled up.”

“Is that what he is then, a diamondback?” Sophia asks. “I thought maybe he was a special species.” Growing up in Louisiana, she’s seen her fair share of snakes, but never any this colour. She thinks she would have remembered that, walking through the woods and seeing something the shade of bleached bones slithering along in the grass towards her.

“He’s an albino variation. They’re pretty rare, but it does happen.”

“I’m glad you got him back safely then.”

Silna looks down at the creature draped over her shoulders, and gives it one of her rare smiles. “The sheriff dropped it off himself.”

“The miserable-looking man?” Fitzjames is peering into the neighbouring tank at a pair of intricately patterned Florida cottonmouths.

Originally, Sophia had planned to swing by Francis’ place before heading out to the reptile sanctuary, but when she arrived at the ranch, she’d found him drinking lemonade with Fitzjames and Jopson on the porch. It was the first time she’d ever seen Fitzjames at Francis’ house, and certainly the first time since her return that she’d dropped by to find her one-time fiance drinking anything other than hard liquor.

“Ah,” Francis had said, finally someone with a brain between their ears. “Sophia, you know how these things work – tell James here he needs better drainage for his sugar crop.”

When Sophia said she had to leave to go meet Silna, Fitzjames had clapped his hands together and said yes, what a grand idea, and he'd dusted off Francis’ old leather Stetson, as though this was the sort of thing the three of them did all the time.

She doesn’t hate it. It’s unexpected, but it’s a relief to finally see Francis out and about. He’d been sitting on that old porch for so long that the whole thing seemed to have begun to sink into the earth, good drainage or no.

“He’s resigning, apparently,” Sophia says now. “Bryant, I mean.” The ‘apparently’ isn’t really necessary; her aunt may be a gossip but she’s usually a reliable one. “I don’t blame him for looking miserable, the things he must have seen at that sawmill.”

Even Edward won’t say much about it, although she has tried to broach the topic more than once over the past few days. Yesterday she didn’t even bother asking, just took him by the hand up to his old bedroom and put on the record player, laying down on the bed beside him the way they used to in their teens.

“I’m sorry I wasn’t there,” she’d said. The late afternoon sun coming through the blinds cast dramatic bands of shadow over their rumpled summer clothes. “I mean, I probably would have just tried to talk you out of it, but still.”

“Funny,” had said Edward, those black eyes downcast. “I was about to say the same thing to you .”

“Oh?”

“I just left you here when I went to Virginia. People were giving you hell about Crozier, and I just up and left you.”

Sophia had tucked her head under his chin and pressed her cheek against his collarbone. His skin was slightly dewy in the heat. She’d never held it against him, wanting to get away from this place, from the upbringing he endured here. She would have done the same. She did, really, in the end. That they both ended up back here is maybe no bad thing. You pick up what you need and take it with you, and you come back for the rest when you’re ready.

“Impressive fellow, isn’t he?” Fitzjames tilts his head as if he were trying to look Silna’s snake in the eyes. “Can’t have been easy for your poor sheriff trying to round him up, just look at the size of him.”

“Seems a shame not to have just left him to himself,” says Francis, “in the wild.”

Silna lifts the creature carefully from around her neck and lowers him gently into his tank. He seems to grow larger to fill the space. “They don’t last long on their own in the wild, due to their abnormalities.”

Sophia glances at Francis. “I suppose some things aren’t suited to life on their own.”

But Francis isn’t looking at her. He’s watching Fitzjames brush lint off his shirtsleeve.

“Stifling in here, isn’t it?” the latter says. “I’m going for a wander, if anyone wants to come.”

“At this time of day? You’ll be eaten to death by midges,” Francis grumbles, but Sophia watches as he follows Fitzjames out into the yard anyway, Fitzjames twirling the parasol he brought from home to keep off the worst of the midday heat.

She can just make out Francis saying, “Stop that, James, or you’ll have someone’s eye out”, before they turn the corner out of sight.

It’s quieter without them. Just the hum of the temperature control and the occasional fritz of the strip lighting overhead. Every now and then, one of the terrapins in the big tank in the corner splashes lazily into the water.

Sophia fiddles with one of her earrings, some cheap turquoise thing she bought in New Mexico several years ago. _A commemoration_ , she’d thought at the time. It was her first real adventure on her own.

She meant it, what she’d thought yesterday about it being the right time for her and Edward to come back here. It isn’t a step backwards, she feels this very strongly. But Silna isn’t Edward Little, nor is she Sophia Cracroft. This town is neither the starting point nor the finish line of her life. And Sophia wouldn’t blame her if she felt it was time to move on, after all that’s taken place.

“Did you know,” says Silna, “rattlesnakes will use the same dens for generation after generation.”

“Oh, really?”

“It’s thought that some have been using the same nesting places for over a century.”

Silna is looking at her with that way of hers, which seems to say she knows something about Sophia that she herself has yet to figure out.

“Is that so? Well, I guess the families must get comfortable here. Can’t blame them for wanting to hang on to a good piece of real estate.”

“But you know, the other thing about rattlesnakes is they’re very adaptable. They can thrive pretty much anywhere, if there’s something there they want.”

“I see.” Sophia touches her earring again, which irritates her, although she can’t really articulate why. Perhaps a reminder that it’s been a long time since she just picked a horizon and drove off towards it like she’d done that time in New Mexico. “Look, is this all some roundabout way of you saying that I’m too dug in here? That I need to…I don’t know…adapt?”

Silna smiles and shrugs. “That’s up to you. I’m just saying, I’ll be here when you figure it out.”

“Oh, well.” Sophia is glad of the sanctuary’s green light, hoping it will offset some of the colour in her face.

In his tank, the great white snake adjusts his thick, pearly coils with the air of a person stretching out their legs.

Sophia straightens up, pushing her hair back from her forehead. “My aunt and I watched a video online about snake handling churches, just out of curiosity, you know? They really do shake those poor snakes around. Makes you wonder how Hickey never managed to get bitten before.”

Silna looks fondly at her albino rattler. “My guess is he never tried it with Tuunbaq before.”

“That’s his name?” Sophia grins. She’d never thought of Silna being the sort to name her snakes, but she likes it, as much as she likes hearing words from Silna’s lyrical language. “What does it mean?”

“Rough translation, it’s a spirit that walks the earth dressed as an animal.”

Sophia looks down at the snake’s serious little eyes – a dash of blood red pupil through milky white – and feels, just for a moment, as though it’s looking back. This whole town seems to have been built on folk stories, why should this one be any less true?

“Maybe that’s why it didn’t work for Hickey then,” she muses. “There’s already something in your snake. No room for the Holy Ghost.”


	23. that old language

There’s something to be said about diners, sticky coffee rings and the smell of disinfectant hovering in the air above a badly cleaned table, the kind of pie that’ll stay glued to your stomach for days, the ageless wireless mumbling something over the counter as Georgie Chambers whistles a tune that has nothing to do with what is currently playing. Sol spends about five minutes just watching Chambers hunt desperately all over the counter for a pencil he’s tucked behind his ear.

“Everything must be perfect,” Jane Franklin is saying, two booths over, where she’s presiding over a meeting of the Women’s Church Committee. “We must project the image of a unified town. A community. Alice, did you prepare the paper flowers? All five hundred of them? Now, I spoke with Graham, his children will be here to help you set things up...”

Sol only ever attended one church fair, sometime before his mother bailed. _Go help out,_ she’d said, _it’ll teach you something_ , and he remembers the tooth-rotting sweetness of the hot beignets he’d been given after they’d finished decorating the stands, all those people in their Sunday clothes and him and the Hartnell boys running around barefoot with their legs scratched and bruised from a morning spent climbing the cypress trees by the river, and it had been the best day he’d ever had until he’d heard Jane Franklin tell her husband, _“They’re not quite as bad as I’d thought, these boys”,_ which at the time had sounded like the gravest insult. 

The doorbell chimes as David Bryant walks in, tipping his hat to the ladies, a curt _Ma’am_ to Jane Franklin before he goes to lean sideways against the counter, his hat under his arm. Like everybody else, Sol’s heard that David is thinking of leaving, but it seems impossible to contemplate right now, what with him fitting in so well. Chambers had the order ready before David was even through the door and he pushes the big mug of black coffee and the plate of whipped cream and pie towards the sheriff with the kind of face means he wouldn’t think twice if David asked him to lie across the train tracks and close his eyes.

“Thanks, Georgie boy,” David says, and gives him an honest-to-god wink before he picks up his breakfast and relocates to Sol’s table. 

“This where you do your interviews now?” Sol asks, taking a long sip of his scalding coffee. “You’re around so often, you’d think they’d have a table reserved for you.”

David shakes his head, rueful. “This ain’t no interview. Just a courtesy call. I dunno if you’ve heard, but we paid a visit to George Hodgson yesterday. Found all sorts of things in the big house. Dead birds and rodents. Live snakes in cages. They’d been using the dead animals to feed the snakes, but it’s possible some of them ended up on Edward Little’s doorstep… Drunk men heading home from _La Mélodie_ in the dark of night, making a detour by the Gun House they used to hear so many bad things about, spitting on the graves of people used to treat them no better than rats. But you know all of that, don’t you?”

Sol raises his eyebrows at him. 

“This some kind of threat?”

Wind rushing in through the open windows of the truck, Magnus Manson and Charles Des Voeux jostling in the passenger seat, Des Voeux saying in that nasal voice, “ _got to make a pit stop”._ The three of them drunker than Francis Crozier after a day spent on his front porch. Sol had stopped the truck halfway on the road, halfway out of it, lying down to smoke on the truck bed with his eyes to the blue haze of the polluted night sky as Magnus heaved in the ditch and Charles went about his business, dumping dead things on Edward’s father’s doorstep because one time at church, some months ago, Simon Little had dared remind Des Voeux Sr that he’d once borrowed a book from the Gun House library, and never returned it.

“I’m just letting you know we might have got to the root of your friend’s vandalism problem,” David shrugs, his shrewd blue eyes never leaving Sol’s face. “Maybe that’ll help him sleep better at night. Unless it wasn’t that was keeping him awake.” He takes a big bite of his pie. “That wasn’t a threat, either. You know Billy Heather used to say you’d make a fine deputy?”

Sol snorts. “Wonder what he’d be thinking now.”

“That it’s lucky you walked out of that forest with your head still attached to your fucking shoulders?”

Sol refuses to rise to the bait. There used to be a time when him and David would hang out in the scrap of woods behind the mobile home park, pretending it was the end times and they were gonna strike out in the wilderness, shooting cans off fence posts and stringing up fish they’d pulled out bare-handed from the ponds behind _La Mélodie_ , but that was a long time ago, the kind of friendship that comes so easily to destitute kids and fades away just as fast once the summer is over and reality kicks in, growth spurts and girls and part-time jobs. Something to that tune. Briefly Sol had thought that Edward had appeared to replace those lost friendships, until the moment Edward had moved in, all sure hands and furrowed brow, to correct his grip on a rifle, and Sol had known, in a diffuse kind of way, that this was (or would, or must be) different.

“Wherever you end up next, I hope you’ll have a good time of it,” Sol says, pulling a few bills out of his pocket, enough to cover his coffee and whatever Chambers decides to buy with the tip, cigarettes or a new lip gloss. 

“I gotta wait until the next elections,” David shrugs. “Trying to get Billie to run, we’ll see how that turns out.”

Sol hesitates. “About…”

“Not much to be said,” David says gruffly. “We got the snakes, we got the guy who was running the snakes, the guy is dead. I’ve also got six witnesses saying Billy Gibson grabbed a rattlesnake of his own free will and decided to wait and see if God was gonna heal him. So the way I see it, Hodgson might be in some trouble for trafficking in venomous snakes, but that’s about it. Unless there’s more bodies in the woods you want to tell me about, or unless Little wants to press charges against someone…”

“I doubt that.”

“Well then.” David takes a sip of his coffee. “Enjoy your summer.”

Sol can tell, as he leaves, that no one in the diner has missed a word of their conversation. Not Chambers who’s been singing _Hotel California_ above the radio’s news report, not sour-faced Dr Stanley who’s come in for his lunch, or Jane Franklin and her committee, who all sneak glances at Sol as he walks out the door, and whose curious stares follow him as he lights himself a cigarette on the parking lot and then as he walks back to his truck. It’s the way with these small towns; he’s made his peace with it a long time ago. Nothing you do around here is ever truly private.

But it’s easy to forget about this when he’s at the Gun House. The Littles always knew how to cut themselves off from the rest of the world. Sol had never set foot inside until that day he’d returned Edward’s car - his boots leaving muddy imprints on the pedals, and he’d had to ease back the driver’s seat because apparently Edward liked to drive as stiffly as he stands. When they were teenagers, the Gun House was out of bounds to everyone who wasn’t a Little, or working for the Littles, or of the kind of social standing that was deemed acceptable by Old Si, which didn’t always mean “old money” but did often mean “arrogant and uptight”.

Sol had rubbed elbows with some of the Littles at school, had got in one or two scrapes with Edward’s older brother James, had made out with Edward’s sister Maggie at a school dance where the both of them had been drunk on too-sweet punch, an incident he’ll never share with Edward, that warm night and his hands fumbling with Maggie’s bra clasp and Maggie tossing her dark hair over her shoulder and telling him she’d always wanted to know what it was like.

 _“To have sex?”_ Sol had asked, because they were both sixteen and he couldn’t really imagine whatever else she might be talking about. 

_“To do it with a guy like you,”_ Maggie had said, matter-of-fact. _“From the wrong side of the tracks.”_

That comment had sobered Sol up enough that he’d staggered off to throw up in some bushes, and that was that. It was no surprise to learn from Edward that Maggie is now in New York, working at an art gallery and “exercising her independence”, whatever that might mean. Sol hadn’t had much of an interest in her in the first place, but that one occurrence had taught him much about the way people like the Littles looked at people like him. 

It'd been a surprise when Edward started coming after him, with his large brown eyes and his bumbling curiosity and his gauche kisses and his impeccable shirts that smelled like the old house, of herbs stashed away in cupboards to preserve clothes and bed linens. 

_“Maybe he’ll let me in,”_ Sol had thought for a time, as he drove past the house, because when he was with Edward he had a tendency to forget about Edward’s family. Until the day Edward showed up at his trailer with a black eye and a bruised jaw and a sports bag full of the worst possible choice of clothes if you were going to run away at 17. When he said his grandfather had “found out”, Sol didn’t ask if Edward meant the gay sex or all the guns they’d borrowed over the past year, he just hauled him in and gave him a bent hanger for his coat and a mug of warm milk to calm his frayed nerves. 

Edward’s father and James came round the next day, Simon Little sad-faced in rumpled clothing, James as much of a dickhead as he’d been in high school, and Sol stood down when a gun was pointed rather nonchalantly at his chest, less of a threat than a reminder.

Now Sol walks the halls of the house and knows that whatever happened inside it - Edward spoke of a great-great-aunt who shot herself, and doesn’t speak of the grandfather who beat him black and blue - this house holds on to whatever it wants, and it isn’t particularly keen on remembering Edward’s family. They clear Old Si’s office in the space of two days, Tommy Armitage dropping by to collect a few antique guns for the hunting and fishing store, Edward’s sister Jane giving stern instructions on the phone, “ _These he can take, these he can’t, I’ll send someone to pick them up”_ , and then they drop off most of the furniture at the scrapyard, Edward refusing to sell it even though the carved oak table alone would fetch a higher price than most of Sol’s worldly possessions. 

Once the room is empty, Edward lies down on his back on the floorboards, his eyes to the plaster carvings on the ceiling. Whatever grim thoughts he’s holding onto, he sets them aside when Sol joins him on the floor, with his mouth on Edward’s neck and his hand insistent between Edward’s legs, rubbing fast until Edward makes a sharp sound and fists a hand in the collar of Sol's shirt. When Edward rolls away from him, all glassy-eyed, the skin around his mouth tinged red from beard burn, Sol can tell he’s no longer thinking about the past. 

“I’ll have you in every room in the house, if that’s what it takes,” he mutters.

Edward’s startled laugh is all the agreement he needs.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


The house behaves itself around Sol.

Some of it is Edward’s doing, if it can be said that there really is any “doing” to it. The Gun House submits to Edward’s moods like the trees submit to the wind, swaying drapes and groaning walls and squeaking floorboards, and so it welcomes Sol because Edward has, settling in around him like a quiet summer evening, alert but companionable. Sol refuses to fear it, this ghostly presence that had inspired so many stories when he was at school. One time, Sol and a few others had dared a kid to run up the steps and ring the front bell, and Wendy’s invectives had followed them all the way to the corner of the street.

Sol’s family has been on the bayou longer than the Littles, and always working class folk, getting their hands dirty and their feet wet. Whatever inhabits this house, Sol won’t bow down to it, even if he has forgotten that old language of creaking wood and swaying moss.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


“We could leave, if you wanted,” Edward says, like that’s really an option, when he’s still in the middle of negotiations with his siblings who’ve been putting up a fight about Edward keeping the house, even though it’s plain they want nothing to do with it.

“Someday yeah, maybe,” Sol answers. 

Summer is coming to an end and it’s been a good day at the shop. Edward has driven Sophia Cracroft back to Baton Rouge and has returned tired and vaguely irritated from his day in the sweltering heat of the city; he’d peeled off his clothes and flung them away like he would gladly have burned them. 

“Where d’you think we’d go?” Sol says, humouring him. “What would we be doing?”

Edward laughs. It happens more and more often but Sol has yet to become used to the sound, and he rises on an elbow to peer at Edward’s face in the gathering dark.

“Anything!” Edward says. “Does it matter? Maybe you could rodeo. Do you miss it?”

Sol considers this. “Maybe. Sometimes. The whole… Snake church thing… I think that was enough risk-taking for a while.”

“I remember your bull-riding. That’s what made me want to… To talk to you. It’s what put the idea in my head at least, but it took me a while to act on it.”

“You saw me bull-riding? When?”

“The summer before I started high school?” Edward sounds embarrassed. “When we went to help the Mansons take their herd to Fort Worth…”

“Ah, yeah,” Sol laughs softly. “They bet me half a bottle of whiskey I couldn’t ride their prize bull for eight seconds. Bull threw me off at the eighth.”

“I watched you and I knew,” Edward says. “I knew I wanted you to know me. I just wasn’t sure how yet.”

Sol might not remember Edward being there, but he sure as hell remembers the bull-riding. He’d run like hell for the fence, feeling the heat of the bull behind him all the way, and he’d knocked his teeth on the bar as he leapt over but the taste of blood in his mouth was easy to wash away with that half a bottle of whiskey. 

In those days there’d been something of the bull in him: walking as though he was swinging weight between his thighs, carrying his gravity in his haunches like he was always fixing for a fight. At times he couldn’t quite discern the difference in himself between roughstock and rider, and this had brought its own flavour of bad luck in the years that had followed Edward’s departure. He’d tangled legs with farmers' daughters and trawler boys alike, until he’d tried it on with one of the Hartnell girls and the girl’s mother had come at him with a rifle. Eventually there hadn't been a bar on the bayou where he was inclined to show his face, for fear of running into some conquest's trigger-happy relative, and he’d wound up at a backwoods watering hole where the door had been kicked in and never repaired so it just hung off the hinges like some wordless invitation to a bad time. 

That’s where he’d met Cornelius, who patched him up, blew him in the bathroom, and then stole the ring-pull from that first can of Lone Star that Edward had drunk, which Sol had been keeping on a cord around his neck. Like dog-tags from a war he’d yet to come back from.

 _“What are you afraid of?”_ Cornelius had asked. _“Come on. I’ll trade you the answer for a drink.”_

 _“Snakes,”_ Sol had said, and Cornelius had smiled his long smile and said, 

_“Do you know that where I come from, they have actual snake churches?”_

Sol had hummed, nursing the beer Cornelius had paid for.

“ _Where’s that?”_

_“The Blue Ridge.”_

Over the years, Sol would hear Cornelius give various answers to that question, name-dropping small towns in Alabama or Georgia or Tennessee or West Virginia, his accent shifting along with his geography, but that first answer might have been the truth, or as close to the truth as Sol or anyone else was ever gonna get.

“How about we both stop worrying about things we can’t change,” Edward whispers, nudging Sol’s side with his bare knee. “Come here.”

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


Sol overhears them from time to time, the kinds of things people say about Edward, but really, Edward’s not that complicated. He thinks it now, as he fits his body to Edward’s outline, pressing languorous kisses to his neck. Sol’s damp hair leaves an imprint on the pillow, and in his arms Edward is still, but for his shoulders rising in a gentle rhythm with his breathing. This is all he wants, Sol reckons. All the poor son of a bitch’s wanted since he was seventeen. Edward’s never been complicated, folks are just bad at reading him.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


_“Someone shot you?”_ Cornelius had asked, switching his cigarette to his right hand so he could pull aside the loose collar of Sol’s flannel shirt, baring the bullet scar on his shoulder.

Sol had shrugged off Cornelius’ hand along with the question, but it’s one people have kept asking him, people at the shop, friends and strangers. He never tells the same story twice, and no story he ever tells comes even close to the truth, which come to think of it he’s never voiced out loud to anyone, not even Edward, not back then and not now, when there are fine lines at the corners of Edward’s eyes and when he kisses that scar Sol can tell he still feels guilty about it, some fifteen years later. 

_Fell for a real son of a gun, body like a rifle, and if I hadn’t moved at the last second, he’d have got me alright, straight through the heart._


	24. no church boy i ever knew

It’s a scorching afternoon, maybe the last of the summer, the blue sky throwing out an arrogant heat as if it can’t imagine autumn rolling in to push it away yet. The grass lies low to the ground like it can’t bear to stand up; ants scurry between the wide cracks in the dirt, and a lizard basks in a spot of sun on the counter of Blanky’s General Store.

“And of course the other thing,” Crozier’s saying, “is James don’t know the first thing about livestock, but then yesterday I come home to find he’s gone and bought half a dozen chickens from the Evanses. And if that weren’t trouble enough, he didn’t have nowhere to keep them so he’s stuck them in my barn.”

Tom Hartnell chances a look at Blanky, who winks at him.

“Must be real tough on you, Francis. I don’t envy you.”

Tom nods. “My sister Mary tried keeping chickens once. Used to catch grasshoppers barehanded to feed them.”

“What happened to them?”

“Gator got most of them. Me and Johnny got the rest.”

Crozier straightens up from where he’s been leaning sleepily in the doorway. “I’m sorry, son. Listen to us going on, we’ve been holding you up.”

“Speak for yourself, Francis.” Blanky pushes Tom’s bag across the counter. Box of ten-by-two screws and a new drill bit. “That everything you need?”

Tom shrugs. He’s never patched up a roof in his life, but he figures it can’t be any harder than fixing a boat hull, and he can do that with his eyes closed.

“Ain’t no bad thing, you mending that church roof now.”

“Bad luck to leave it,” Tom says.

Blanky looks out of the window at the thick clouds piling on the horizon. “We’re due a proper bout of rain. Gonna be mean when it hits.”

Crozier shakes his head. “He’s been saying that all week.”

“I know my weather, Francis. Go on, get home, the pair of you. It’s about quitting time.”

Out in the street, dust still hanging in the static air from whatever truck rolled down here last, Crozier claps Tom on the shoulder. “You keeping okay, son?”

“Keeping busy.”

“And Pastor John, how’s he doing these days? Don’t get over to his services as often as I used to.”

Some folks don’t. Like they’ve had enough religion to last them a lifetime, and Tom can’t blame them for that. Others keep going as they always have, like maybe that hole in their Sunday morning frightens them more than Cornelius Hickey ever did. Tom’s not sure he blames them for that either. Too much time leaves room for thoughts he’d rather not have these days.

“Pastor’s okay,” he says. “Quiet sometimes. But you know, that’s what he’s like.”

Crozier pats his shoulder again, gentler this time. “You did the right thing, telling me what you did. Might have ended up with a lot more like Billy Gibson if you hadn’t.”

Tom nods, but he can’t help feeling like this grass in the heat. Like he just lay down and let the trouble roll over him. He weren’t no Edward Little, running off to the woods with a loaded gun, or Miss Cracroft weaselling out those snake stealers, or John confronting the very man who got him bit in the first place. Hell, he couldn’t even go to the sheriff on his own, had to get Crozier to do that for him. Least he can do now is fix the damn roof.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


The corrugated metal is hot enough that it’d probably leave blisters on his feet, but he has put on shoes for the occasion. A big pair of his father’s boots that have been up and down the river more times than Tom himself, and he’s had to stuff them with newspaper at the ends to make them fit, but he never did feel right about stepping into John’s church with dust on his heels.

He works for the better part of an hour, measuring out the large sheets of metal and sawing them to fit. It isn’t as much like fixing a boat as he’d imagined, and the damage is worse up here than John made out, but he wings his way through it as best he can, figuring that could be the family motto.

Around four, John appears in the weeds below, holding a glass of sweet tea in each slender hand. You could feel some kind of way about a man with hands like that, and Tom always has, since he was a boy, watching the pastor’s son handing out flyers for church fairs, or undoing the top button on his shirt in the heat.

John looks neat in his clean pressed shirt now. Tom is aware how he himself smells of sweat and moss, his hair gone ratty and wild in the muggy air that’s been promising a storm for weeks now. He measures the distance between them as he climbs down from the roof, figuring he’d rather not make any more of a mess out of John Irving.

“How was town?” John says, when they’re sitting in the peeling rowing boat in the river behind the church.

Tom sips his sweet tea, trailing one hand in the water. “Ah, you know. Same old. Old Crozier moaning about Fitzjames like he’ll drop dead if he don’t mention the man’s name every other minute.”

“Any word about the Chambers boy?”

“Nothing new,” Tom says, which is only half a lie. His sisters, out picking mushrooms two nights ago, saw Georgie and the sheriff stopped at a red light on Bitter Creek road, and through the rolled-down window Betsy overheard him say, _And you’re sure I don’t need a passport to go to California?_

“Well, his mother doesn’t seem too concerned, I must say.” John sighs. “I suppose that happens round here, doesn’t it? Kids jumping ship.”

Tom wonders if he’s remembering Edward Little leaving town all those years ago.

“Hey.” John peers at him. “Something eating you?”

“Ain’t nothing.”

“You’re not the only one capable of perceiving things, Tom Hartnell. You’re worried about something.”

John sits up straighter, shifting his legs, and the tips of their shoes touch, but it feels different, strange, and Tom realises he’s still wearing his father’s work boots.

“Tom?”

The sun streaming through the cypress boughs picks out the curves of John’s face, soft as butter in the hazy light. Tom doesn’t know how to say the things he wants to say – or doesn’t want to say, but feels they need to be said.

_I should have done more to help you._

_I won’t ever be nothing like Edward Little or Sophia Cracroft._

_Don’t carry on with me just to be polite_.

John shuffles closer to him. “You remember that first night, when you drove me home from the bar?”

“You were asking me about the devil.” Tom gives him half a smile. “Didn’t kiss me like no church boy I ever knew.”

John laughs and looks away. “You know, my grandfather set up this church, a long time back. His father was no good, swindled his way from Edinburgh to Baton Rouge, left a lot of men with holes in their pockets and women with babies in their bellies. My grandfather was so ashamed of him, he started preaching here, passed it on to his son, who passed it on to me. Three generations trying to counter the shame of one man’s actions. I always felt like that was what I was for. Maybe the only thing I was for.”

John sighs and pushes the hair out of his face.

“And then you brought me back here that night, and it was like seeing it for the first time. The church, the trees, the river. It’s all alive when you’re here. I think that’s how people are supposed to feel about God.”

Tom stares at him. A breeze has picked up and the branches are creaking overhead. Everything feels vivid, from the chorus of cicadas in the grass to the colour of John’s mouth. Some part of Tom wants to kiss him right here in the boat, with no one but the trees and the river to witness them. But he has never heard John speak like this and he fears if he cuts him short now, he’ll never hear it again.

“I believe in God. I don’t know how not to. But when I was up there in the woods, up at that sawmill, it came back to me, what you said about faith and religion, like there was a difference. I’m a religious man, but it was you… I knew you would be waiting here, sure as I knew the sky was blue.” John flexes his hand in that nervous way of his. “Hickey kissed me.”

Tom almost spits out his tea. “He what?”

“He kissed me, when I was up there. Like it was nothing, and it _was_ nothing, coming from him. It was almost cruel. Some of those men weren’t making choices of their own free will – he could be…coercive like that – but I knew I had to get back here. To you, to this place. So I set off running and that’s how I got out. Nothing like religion in a place like that, but something like faith. And so whatever’s on your mind, Tom, I thought you ought to know that.”

The river is lapping at the sides of the boat with more force now, the skin prickling on Tom’s bare arms. He opens his mouth before he’s even really thought of a reply, and the storm comes at last, weeks’ worth of weather all saved up and flung at them in one go. There is muscle in the wind shaking the cypresses and the boat lurches, the water needled with a million holes as the rain beats down, whipping the banks to mudslides. He can barely even see the church now through the downpour.

“Aw hell.” Tom tries to get his balance as he stands. Lightning flashes, licking up the scene like a neon sign. “I never finished nailing down that sheet of corrugated. Wind’ll tear it right off, your aisle’s gonna flood.”

But John catches him by the waist and pulls him back down into the boat, which rocks with the sudden movement and pitches them both into the churning river. For a moment there’s nothing but the taste of dirty water in his mouth, the muffled quiet of being submerged, and he considers old Crozier and Blanky laughing with their tobacco stained smiles, his daddy staggering on the deck of the trawler and the blood still fresh on Johnny’s knuckles, the twang of banjo strings snapping on a hot southern night, the skin on John’s upper arm turning swollen and purple as rattlesnake venom surged through his bloodstream. The course of life’s events seems slower than that poisoning, but no less thorough.

He isn’t afraid of drowning, knows these waterways intimately, as well as he knows John’s hand, which he grabs a hold of now, pulling him towards the surface. Tom kicks off his father’s heavy boots and leaves them on the riverbed. He and John come out of the water drenched and filthy, but it’s the same mud sticking to each of them, ain’t no more holier for being on a preacher’s son than on some barefooted river boy.

Tom scrambles up the bank and starts for the church, not entirely sure what he plans to do when he gets there. Only a fool ever got up on a roof in a lightning storm, but he’d be willing to bet that ain’t the craziest thing a Hartnell’s ever done.

Thunder echoes overhead like God and all His angels hauling timber across the sky. Tom gestures to the roof, but John shakes his head.

“It’ll hold,” he says, raising his voice above the hammering rain, like he’s talking over whatever the Lord has to say. He grips Tom’s hand fiercely. “It’ll hold.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> endless heartfelt thanks to you who has read this story to the end! we would love to hear your thoughts :)


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